Bring the joy of train delays home with your very own departure board Great news for transport nerds! It is now possible to recreate the desolation of an empty platform with every train delayed or canceled, thanks to an unnervingly accurate replica of a station departure board. Departure board showing train times behind a bar Train departure board (pic: UK Departure Boards) – click to enlarge …
These really are the coolest thing ever, and if I had a suitable den with pool table it would be near the top of the list.
As for the one with the speaker, not so much. I find being told every 15 minutes "If you see something that doesn't look right.... see it, say it, sorted" a teensy tiny bit annoying, as my brain is constantly telling me "Well that guy is wearing purple socks and blue trousers, that really doesn't look right, should I call them?".
Even worse "It's a bit rainy, careful you don't slip".
Even worse still, "There's a bit of hot weather you might want to think about drinking water".
I'm still waiting for "If you don't eat food for a few weeks you might starve to death" or "Don't stab yourself in the eye with a fork" or perhaps "Take off your coat when you go indoors or you won't feel the benefit". The last one is what every Nana said in the 70s, which I think they must have all learned together in Nana training school.
Mine were forever telling me "Don't take the cork off your fork".
Icon, because I didn't listen.
Most annoying of all is "remember to take your stuff when you leave the train".
It's probably much less annoying to those who work in transport Lost Property offices! They are veritable Aladdin's Cave of tat including some incredible items you'd think it impossible to accidentally forget and leave laying around on a train or platform like prosthetic limbs, false teeth etc :-)
A quick google finds a few articles showing some of the incredible stuff people mane to lose on public transport. Clearly some people DO need to be constantly reminded not to leave their entire drum kit on the train!
I like the "Keep your bags and belongings with you at all times..." that's played at Harrow and Wealdstone. I'm sure the voice artist for that one is a a classically trained actor called Guy
Almost twenty years ago I thought about building my own single-color board and writing scripts to pull/scroll news headlines -- like watching the cable news bottom-ticker without the rest of the screen and the idiocy (and audio) therein. I could glance at it periodically during the day, or not.
But a professional-looking panel like this blows away my home-brew design entirely. I could make the middle-size fit with my WFH setup (though I wouldn't appreciate the glare-cover reflecting from the window behind me). With that much real estate, I could see the entire headline at once (scroll in, pause, scroll out), and use multiple colors for various bits: news, weather, sports. Flashing bits of contrasting color and sound FX for breaking news, weather alerts, and live score updates.
This company needs to broaden their offerings; surely others have the money I don't for such a device. Same display, just different software.
You can get nice looking LED panels like that, from the usual Chinese suppliers for very reasonable prices or just simulate them on a TV or wide monitor (suitable fonts are easily available).
Where there is an api, it is easy to grab and display the information. For these rail apis, I have done a widget version but the number of api calls for free is limited.
For the USAians, Adafruit has their MatrixPortal devices which use the HUB-75 standard to communicate with the LED panels, and it runs Micro / Circuit Python.
I have one running, of all things, as a clock with a temperature and humidity sensor on my back covered patio.
I'll give you points for seeing some of possibilities here, and wanting to be creative ...
... but I'll dock you those points, and then some, for failing to excercise some common sense. What you do for your own enjoyment is purely up to you, but don't expect many other people to appreciate your artistic visions.
If there's something I'd personally hate, it'd be yet another screen full of flashy, dancing monkeys trying to distract me.
Don't give me glitter and flash, just give me the plain-text facts.
(Mine's the one with the Decwriter printout in the pocket )
"With that much real estate, I could see the entire headline at once (scroll in, pause, scroll out), and use multiple colors for various bits: news, weather, sports. Flashing bits of contrasting color and sound FX for breaking news, weather alerts, and live score updates."
I think you just described the RSS feed programs we all used to have scrolling along the bottom of our computer screens a decade or two ago :-)
The Little Green Dragon pub in Winchmore HIll has had something similar to this inside for a few years. You can see it in these photos photo https://maps.app.goo.gl/M9CkivkQCLhaDGgn6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/jkAs9YYijeonz7jD9
It's updated live with the local buses which run in both directions outside.
Also happens to be a great pub if you're in the area.
FWIW on this side of the Atlantic trains get cancelled, not canceled.
Spent three years as a young'un in Australia. Money was L/s/d and spelling had extra letters. Everything else was different as well. Unfortunately, I was an impressionable youngster, so some of this "stuck" in my neurons, which is why US m/d/y dates sometimes become d/m/y, and I always have to stop and think before writing.
Went back for a visit this year and discovered it takes about 2 weeks to acclimate to traffic (and people) coming towards you on the right instead of on the left, and somewhat longer to re-acclimate. I have been back in the US now for almost 8 months, and still look twice at some signs, wondering why there's no "u"
Just up the road from me here in the US, there's a strip-mall, and the large roadside signs declare it to be named "Market Centre".
I pointed this out to my (USAian born-and-bred) grandmother-in-law once, and she confessed that she'd never ever noticed the British spelling, in over 30 years of driving past it; subsequent conversations with colleagues here have shown that no-one has any clue as to why it's spelled that way.
And I still get asked to "say something with your wonderful accent!" whenever I go grocery-shopping, but that's a whole other saga.
"I think it's the French spelling that we, outside of the English speaking Americas, use."
English is a mongrel language at best and has evolved over a very, very long time and is constantly adding new words, although spelling has tended to stagnate more since the written word came into common vogue with the advent of the printing press, but there are signs of "Americanisation" thanks to t'internet and the sheer flood of "content" spewed out from the left side of the pond. Especially the overuse of superlatives.
Apparently the people of Friesland speak something very close to "Old English" and it's one of those places where an English speaker can get very confused because they almost but not quite "hear" English and yet not understand it :-)
That site is really nice but I pissed off Greater Anglia recently by demanding some refund for a train that was 15 1/4 minutes late into Liverpool St. They nixed the refund swearing blind the delay was only 14 minutes. They did eventually cough up when I pursued it though. That makes me wonder about the accuracy of realtimetrains vis-a-vis the 'official' database.
The other excellent nerdy sites are traksy.uk and signalmaps.co.uk. The latter even shows points settings as well as signals. Try Ely for a complex junction with reversing trains etc. (e.g. Liverpool to Norwich).
I have one of the ones from Train Departures which are half the price and use a direct feed from the National Rail API, so no subscription and no dependence on the manufacturers.
A micro-USB port… in 2024… with the EU power connector regulation about to come into effect…
(which, if we had any sense, we would be similarly making mandatory as we would still have been an EU member, or, at the very least, in our current benighted position, we would still be adopting anyway as we are a now insignificant player compared to our 400 million neighbours)
Might I suggest that this sort of silliness (and Sinclair-style penny-pinching (bless him)) is why there are sadly so few British tech successes these days. (I mean, it's a cool gadget, but would it really have been so hard to spec it with a USB-C power port instead?)
And while there are unlikely to be many purchasers of this outwith GB, that's not really the point. [muses: Notwithstanding that Northern Ireland's (limited) rail network is entirely separate (in many ways) anyway; given NI's status of being "half in" the Single Market, will the USB-C power connector regulation be mandatory there in a way that it will only be de facto mandatory in the unlit sumplands?]
You know where you keep bashing your head against a wall over and over 'cos it feels great when you stop? That's the kind of vibe I get from these little gadgets, like working as a handyman at a dom's flat, you just can't get a enough punishment and you'll do anything to get some!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
