Train company First Great Western has abolished shared sleeper compartments on trains and will force single travellers to pay a supplement. The company has cited privacy concerns as its motivation.

“It is considered more appropriate in the modern age to allow people their privacy. You wouldn’t expect to share a hotel room with a stranger and nor should you expect to share a sleeper carriage with someone you don’t know.”

On the midnight London-Cornwall run, couples will continue to pay £30 each for a sleeper but a solo passenger will now pay £40. Instead of accommodating up to 24 people in its sleeper carriages, there is now space for only 12 if everyone travelled alone.

I think this is a step in the wrong direction. With the planet in the state it is in, we need to be doing everything we can to make it easier and more economical to travel by train - or at least not by air. This will reduce availability for everyone and make it more expensive for singles. I might not expect to share a hotel room with a stranger but I would expect to share a hostel dormitory or an aeroplane cabin with a stranger and the same goes for a sleeper carriage. It’s usual to segregate strangers by gender (while friends can opt to share mixed cabins) and I think that’s appropriate.

When I went to the Arctic in 2006 to see polar bears I found it a painful irony that I had very few alternatives to flying in getting there. I tried to organise train and ferry transport to get from London to the departure point in Oslo. But the ferry crossing from Newcastle to Stavanger or Bergen in Norway would have cost me £500 without a car because the company’s policy was to make me book an entire cabin at double the cost. That was one way and does not include the cost of travelling from London to Newcastle or the Norwegian coast to Oslo. The journey would have taken over a day but that was not the deal breaker for me - I simply couldn’t afford to pay over a grand when I was already paying thousands for the trip and the cost of a flight was £100 return.

Apparently other UK train companies are considering following suit. Fortunately, First Great Western is not asking people to pay double but it sets a worrying principle. I imagine that there are a lot of single travellers on trains, and the London-Cornwall and London-Scotland legs are particularly popular with business travellers. If revenues dip from having more berths booked out by one person paying £40 rather than two people paying £60, they might rethink their policy. Then again, they might just raise the single supplement to compensate for the shortfall.

Surely this should be optional? If someone is very concerned about privacy, there is nothing to stop them booking the second bed in the compartment. But for most people, surely gender segregation is enough?