Grrrr!

[venta]

Reading'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.

Comments

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Ouch. :-(

Does Reading not have those boards listing destinations one by one with the details of the trains which go to each destination? I'd be surprised if it didn't. On the other hand, far fewer of these signs indicate platform numbers these days than used to be the case. Perhaps there is some secret revolution in platform assignment methodology in progress, or perhaps they're just being slack about things. I know which of those options I'd put my money on.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

If platform numbers were timetabled and publicly available like that, one of the tiny satisfactions of commuting would be removed, that of boarding the idling train at the terminus and finding a seat while amateur travellers fall for the advice not to board the train until it's been cleaned and announced.

There are further possibilities for failing to locate a train: if you'd managed to find it in time, the destination might not have been displayed on the front, nor on LED scrollers inside, nor announced by the driver. The uncertainty can add magic to a journey.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Does Reading not have those boards listing destinations one by one with the details of the trains which go to each destination?

It does, but they don't provide platform information. And, by the time I'd thought of consulting them to find out the eventual destination of the train, they were on the wrong side of the ticket barriers (or I was).

However, once I'd missed the train I did use them to plot my new route... I don't usually lose my temper, or vent it on unsuspecting inanimate objects, but I did discover that the hinged frames of the timetables make a very satisfying "clang" if you swing them rather more violently than is absolutely necessary.

[venta.livejournal.com]

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Ahem. Nasty fit of the italics, there.

[venta.livejournal.com]

You travel from a station where the location/destination of a train is that predictable ? Wow. I'm jealous.

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...

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

At least the display of safety information and other low-grade nuisances is configurable. The LED scrollers on platforms in south-east London have a subtle but stupid fault - they list the destinations faithfully, but start over each time the ETA changes. On suburban services this can vary in less than the time taken to list all destinations.

Yet again someone decided the simplest form of beta testing is real life...

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Ooh, now there's a thought - commuters as masters of the modern-day magical art of public transport, requiring considerable practice and dedication before mastery.

Disappointingly close to reality and yet somehow dissatisfactory. :-(

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Far fewer of such boards provide good platform info than they used to, which is rather a shame.

I know someone who took a year out before university on the "A Year In Industry" scheme and worked for a branch of BR (remember, this was about ten years ago) producing not those signs but the big local information signs that you normally find next to them. Sounds like a good job to me!

It should be a sign of shame to the British...

[ieyasu.livejournal.com]

...that a relatively intelligent American (yes, I flatter myself) can with 5 months practice in the Japanese language walk into a train station, slay the language barrier with mental pitchforks, stride confidently through the ramparts of the toll system with nary a thought that he's paid over or under the price required, possibly outwit the evil Witch of Season Tickets to gain multiple entry rights to yon steamless carriage, and be reasonably certain that he's going to the proper station on the proper train, all in less time than it will take that same American to make a train change at Reading.

Admittedly, this is easier in a station like Umeda where the place names are listed in Japanese and Roman characters, but even in Arashiyama it was easy to find my way around. Those timetables seem designed solely for railway fetishists or old folk who have nothing better to do with their time, a sort of unchanging shipping forecast. I'm afraid that the comment above, 'just another example of someone deciding that the best beta testing is real life' misses the point a bit: beta-testing implies the intention to do a release phase and test the bugs.

My only conclusion is that British Rail, or its various post-privatisation forms since it's not gotten any better since then, is controlled by a cabal of evil wizards who gain their power through the frustration of others. I admit, it seems unlikely, but it's the old Holmesian maxim of discarding all other possibilities: such a brainless system requires more than just incompetence, it demands a level of malice.

(Yeah, I had to take the train this weekend too.)

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

There's nothing new under the sun. In a charity shop in Witney I picked up a book called Notes From Overground by 'Tiresias', a collection of puns and jottings on commuting the Oxford-Paddington line. It starts 'Man is born free, and is everywhere in trains'.

Ooh, I've thought of another bêtise: the monitors on the platforms at London Bridge station have a screensaver.

*suspicious glare*

[venta.livejournal.com]

Are you dissing the shipping forecast ?

Only slightly...

[ieyasu.livejournal.com]

...I'm aware some like it for the soporific effects.