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Being a cheapskate when I'm paying my own fare, I asked for a second class sleeper to Glasgow. I was told there weren't any. I had to pay extra for a cabin to myself.

But at the station, the attendant showed me into a sharing cabin. I pointed out that they'd wrung an extra £20 from me for a single one.  Apparently they knew that - and I'd have it to myself. 

So why couldn't I have bought a second class sleeper and share it?  I'd pay less, and they'd make more.  Surely that's win win, as the entrpreneurial go-getters who have snatched the railways from the dead hand of the public sector would say.

The problem, apparently, is that the computer thinks there are more single cabins than there are, and fewer double ones, and no one has yet discovered a way to apprise it of the correct situation.  Scotreail can't sell second class sleepers to customers who are clamouring to buy them because the computer says they do not exist.

If only the railways were still publicly owned, the Daily Mail would have exposed this absurdity ages ago.