Virgin Trains is to trial a family carriage on selected West Coast trains between London Euston, Birmingham New Street and Manchester Piccadilly throughout August to make travel more fun for mums, dads and kids during the school summer holidays. If successful the concept will be introduced across the entire network.

Family fun will have a spy theme with free MI:V activity packs for children travelling in Coach C containing spy activity sheets, binoculars, crayons and special offers to appeal to all ages. Packs will be given out by station and onboard teams or by a dedicated customer service assistant on some trains.

On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays the 09:45 train from Manchester to Euston and the 12:05 from Euston to Manchester will have Coach C available to tempt families out of their cars to spend quality travel time together.

On Thursdays and Fridays the 10:00 from Birmingham to Euston and the 10:10 from Euston to Birmingham will have the family carriage and on Saturdays the 09:44 Birmingham to Euston and the 17:17 Euston to Birmingham.

The journey experience will be enhanced by child-friendly snacks and drinks on sale in the Shop, availability of child fares and Family Railcards and family travel sections online with information and station activity sheets.

The fun initiative builds on the popular Kidz Bags, a long established gift for children travelling during school holidays, and supports Virgin Trains' Love Every Second campaign. It will help to involve the whole family in a sharing of quality time impossible when crammed into the car during a stressful motorway journey.

Children are telling their parents to ditch the car and take the train instead for more enjoyable travelling. In a unique survey of ten-year-olds, twice as many said they wanted to travel by train rather than by car on journeys of more than one hour. In the independent telephone survey commissioned by Virgin Trains among 154 ten-year-olds, 60 per cent said that they would prefer to travel by train, while only 30 per cent wanted to be cooped up in a car. Ten per cent did not voice a preference.