I've read various accounts of people trying to reclaim lost baggage and it's a Kafkaesque process designed to be totally useless
But the railway operators are 50% nationalised now. Northern, TransPennine, South West Railway, LNER, Greater Anglia, c2c, ScotRail, Southeastern, TfW are all government owned.
And the forerunner in increasing fares the last couple of years has been...the government. They renationalised various operators during and after COVID and are now busy decreasing rail subsidies and increasing fares.
(yes even with the freezing of some fares in April. It's only some fares. And prices had been going up multiple times a year in many places for a few years. There is a wider picture and other schemes happening pushing up prices)
Maybe Great British Rail will slowly and surely return us to a less mean system. Time will tell
You realise even the subsidies go to pay Canadian pension funds [0]
No mercy. Fuck those guys.
Same guy that stung me for not having a ticket when every other day they'd come round and let me buy a ticket on the train.. I even went to the window at the destination for a ticket, and then got referred for a penalty fare. Fuck that guy.
Many people find out the hard way just how many legal powers the railway has (they have even more they could enforce, such as dropping litter, or playing music, or being inebriated - criminal offencs with no excuse)
The social contract of buying a ticket and behaving in return for good customer service has broken down, it's gone. It's really the entire of the UK at this point.
I guess you being somewhat fine with waiting a week meant nothing important was in the bag.
The trouble with the UK is we continue to put up with the bar getting lower and lower each year. Honestly someone would defend it taking a month to get a bag back as being fine