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ventaReading's quite a big station. It has at least 12 platforms, and many trains. At 5pm on a Friday, it is quite a busy place.
It would be nice if the indicator boards worked. I know things go wrong occasionally, but come on, they've been out for over a week now.
Since the indicator boards are broken, it'd be good if there were a person on the help desk.
If you're too short staffed to put someone on the help desk, it would be all right if the information office were open.
When the information office is closed, and the queue for tickets is looking like a 15 minute wait, those of us who want to know from which platform the imminently-departing train to Twickenham will leave have to ask the person who's manning the ticket barrier.
If he says, in tones of great surprise, "do trains to Twickenham go from here?", this is not consoling.
When the only option appears to be to begin a tour of the platforms, looking in each case at the next train expected on that platform (and the list of stops, since the ultimate destination of the train I required appeared to be a closely guarded secret), this is quite annoying.
It rapidly becomes more annoying when, having triumphantly located the correct platform (4A, if anyone cares, trains to London Waterloo call at Twickenham), one arrives there just in time to see the train pull out of the station.
Ironically, this was the first recorded case all week of a train I wished to catch departing Reading on time.
It would be nice if the indicator boards worked. I know things go wrong occasionally, but come on, they've been out for over a week now.
Since the indicator boards are broken, it'd be good if there were a person on the help desk.
If you're too short staffed to put someone on the help desk, it would be all right if the information office were open.
When the information office is closed, and the queue for tickets is looking like a 15 minute wait, those of us who want to know from which platform the imminently-departing train to Twickenham will leave have to ask the person who's manning the ticket barrier.
If he says, in tones of great surprise, "do trains to Twickenham go from here?", this is not consoling.
When the only option appears to be to begin a tour of the platforms, looking in each case at the next train expected on that platform (and the list of stops, since the ultimate destination of the train I required appeared to be a closely guarded secret), this is quite annoying.
It rapidly becomes more annoying when, having triumphantly located the correct platform (4A, if anyone cares, trains to London Waterloo call at Twickenham), one arrives there just in time to see the train pull out of the station.
Ironically, this was the first recorded case all week of a train I wished to catch departing Reading on time.
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no subject
Date: 2002-12-09 03:33 am (UTC)if you'd managed to find it in time, the destination might not have been displayed on the front, nor on LED scrollers inside
Something I observed recently when catching trains late at night, when the announcing/updating of screens in Reading is even more slapdash:
Quite often it's necessary to hop inside the train and read the LED scroller to check where it's calling[*]. Now, suppose you want to know whether the train stops at, say Culham - which is such a small station that most of the stopping trains don't even bother.
In them old days, you looked at the piece of paper, saw Culham listed, hopped aboard. Now you have to wait for the LED scroller to choose to vouchsafe this information. Having experimentally tried this a few times, the scroller usually reminds me to take my luggage with me when I leave, tells me where safety information is displayed, and welcomes me to Thames trains, before painstakingly ambling through the list of stops. 2 out of 3 times I've checked this, the train has pulled away before it's got to the point in the list where Culham would be mentioned....
[*] Read the timetables, you say ? I'm not making that mistake again.
Do you have the scrolls? No, I always walk this way...
Date: 2002-12-09 05:01 am (UTC)Yet again someone decided the simplest form of beta testing is real life...