Clock
I have a feeling that someone tried to show a clock, but auto correct got in the way.
The latest innovation in UK public transport: Schrödinger's trains
BORK!BORK!BORK! Guessing games are all the rage, and commuters trying to get home from London Victoria station found themselves flipping a virtual coin to guess the location of their train after Inspector Bork paid a visit to the station's platform board. London Victoria Station is a major transport hub for England's capital …
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Monday 11th May 2026 10:57 GMT Bebu sa Ware
"the board was of the Solari split-flap type"
I recall many Sydney(AU) stations before being upgraded for the 2000 Olympics had slide-in signs on the board for the arriving services with the due the time indicated by rotatable digit blocks and AM/PM (24 hr clock took a few more decades ;) which a subordinate railway empIoyee updated.
I think the Redfern station had the services also on rotatable blocks and with similar blackboard spaces under those for write-in services.
The announcements over the Tannoy were always incomprehensible at all the stations leading to the conjecture that it was in some peculiar railway language unknown to the rest of humanity.
I don't recall the Borkenfairie ever paying a visit but I also don't remember the trains ever being particularly on time either.
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Monday 11th May 2026 14:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "the board was of the Solari split-flap type"
Unintelligible tannoy announcements are an inevitable result of the building design. Rail stations and airport terminals are large and have plenty of hard surfaces to reflect sound - so anyone try to hear the announcements will be getting both the direct sound from a speaker and several reflections with assorted delays. Concert halls, OTOH, are designed for proper acoustics and potentially reflective surfaces are treated to absorb sound waves instead. Old churches are often quite good, acoustically, as they are designed so that the minister/priest can be heard clearly enough from areas like the pulpit. Adding electronic amplification can, if not done correctly, make matters worse as the buildings reflective surfaces were never designed with speakers in mind. As a case in point, in one church where I've worked on their AV, I take some of the musical instruments (such as acoustic guitars) out of the public address circuit - still hooked into the circuit for streaming and recording, but they're heard more clearing live when left alone.
But I've now drifted well off the Bork!!!
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Tuesday 12th May 2026 16:16 GMT JimboSmith
Re: "the board was of the Solari split-flap type"
Had a sudden flashback to Airplane and the nun(?) with the guitar
I was thinking of Nicola Walker and Paul Stacey as the Frightful Folk Duo in Four Weddings and a Funeral
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Monday 11th May 2026 19:03 GMT Missing Semicolon
Re: "the board was of the Solari split-flap type"
At MAN (Manchester Piccadilly for non-train-users) the announcements are with a female voice. It does seem to remain intelligible even in poor conditions.
Even if you can hear the templating. "The train to {destination} will be delayed by {optimistic_delay} minutes. {operator_short_name} apologises for any inconvenience this may cause"
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Tuesday 12th May 2026 11:44 GMT mhoulden
Re: "the board was of the Solari split-flap type"
At least once I've heard the auto announcer at Leeds station just say "We are very sorry" with nothing afterwards. Still better than getting a different voice saying something like "Would Inspector Sands please report to Wetherspoons as someone has forgotten to clean the grill again."
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Monday 11th May 2026 10:59 GMT Simon Harris
Schrödinger's trains II
It amuses me when waiting for a train at Shepherd's Bush to see the train indicator showing not only that a train has been cancelled, but how many carriages the now non-existent train has.
(it is not so amusing when it's the train I wanted to be on).
Although, to be fair, Microsoft Teams is as bad by giving me reminders of how long it is until a meeting that has been marked as cancelled is due to start.
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Monday 11th May 2026 12:06 GMT blu3b3rry
Re: Schrödinger's trains II
The trains on one of my local lines often split and join around halfway on the route, with the forward four or eight carriages continuing on to a further destination. As a result, the automated onboard PA announces which carriage you are in, and where it is in the train. For example "This is carriage 4 of 12."
On occasion the system gets a little confused, leading to such wonderful automated announcements as "This is carriage 10 of 4"
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Monday 11th May 2026 12:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Schrödinger's trains II
Still today in France, there are trains that have 2 times of departure, 3 minutes apart.
Why ?
Because SNCF is still using an airplane planning tool.
Turns out, on some lines, the train will split in 2 sets of wagons, that will end in different places.
So, they are 2 distinct trains for the software, while at departure, a single one, departing at a unique time.
This particular use case was not planned in the software cos it's hard to imagine a plane splitting in half mid-flight, with both landing, at least safely, in different places.
Probably readers here have no idea of the massive confusion for occasional travellers ...
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Monday 11th May 2026 13:05 GMT Simon Harris
Re: Schrödinger's trains II
It is however a use case that should have been predicted by SNCF. I remember in 1991 taking the ferry to Calais, and an overnight train to Nice, which split in Paris. I remember particularly well, because I was in the wrong part of the train and had to make a mad rush to get to the Nice part before it disappeared into the night.
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Monday 11th May 2026 18:28 GMT Steve Davies 3
Re: Schrödinger's trains II
It was even worse at places like Ostend or Hook Of Holland back in the 1970's. The long distance trains would have carriages going to many different destinations. One train from Hook had carriages for Hannover, Berlin, Hamburg and Copenhagen.
Then along came fixed train sets and the night shunting fun went away.
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Monday 11th May 2026 15:48 GMT PB90210
Re: Schrödinger's trains II
The really annoying thing is when they have a 3 line display and the next train is cancelled, so the display wastes 2 lines displaying the cancelled train and all the stations... sorry, 'station stops'... that it will no longer be stopping at, with the 3rd line displaying the next couple of trains and a message that there will be a Sunday replacement bus service!
My local station always displays 'formed of 5 carriages' irrespective of wether the train has 4 or 5 carriages, meaning you occasionally have to sprint down the platform as the end of the train passes
SW trains also have the annoying 'Artereo' trains on the Hounslow loop service that insist on announcing every single stop out from Waterloo and back to Waterloo every couple of minutes. I've been asked a couple of times 'is this the train to X' by people who have missed half the announcement and are worried they got on a train in the wrong direction.
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Monday 11th May 2026 17:57 GMT FirstTangoInParis
Re: Schrödinger's trains II
At certain stations near me (can’t catch train too often as it’s exorbitantly expensive) the trains are two groups of four carriages. They can’t even announce the correct order of the carriages even though said train has already stopped at a few stations already.
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Thursday 14th May 2026 15:37 GMT PB90210
Re: Schrödinger's trains II
There is the tale, in the days before guard controlled doors, of the passenger who absentmindedly alighted when the train stopped at a signal at the disused Sth Kentish Town, just a couple of stops north of Mornington Cres... never to be seen again!
It went down in folklore but turns out it was a fable written for the London Transport staff magazine
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Monday 11th May 2026 11:10 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Schrödinger trains
Given Erwin Schrödinger was resident in Ireland for the duration of WW2 and until 1955 you might imagine such a train might be equally both in Limerick and Kilkenny before potentially equally arriving in Dublin or Sligo at some past or future time. Perhaps that was a fair description of the Republic's 1950s railways.
Perhaps unfairly I always imagined Ireland was one of the few places the Borkenfairie didn't need to visit.
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Wednesday 13th May 2026 04:55 GMT The Organ Grinder's Monkey
Re: Schrödinger trains
Ladies & gentlemen, I would like to introduce to you today the first in The Register's new "Formal Definitions" to sit alongside our internationally recognised weights & measures.
Mr Yet Another Anonymous Coward has stumbled upon the absolute definition of the lowest of "Low Bars".
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Monday 11th May 2026 11:24 GMT ParlezVousFranglais
Adams not Schrödinger
The obvious solution of course is to fall back on Douglas Adams' principle of Zen navigation - just pick a commuter who looks like they know where they are going and follow them - you won't end up where you wanted to get to, but you'll be surprised when you find yourself somewhere you really needed to be...
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Monday 11th May 2026 12:12 GMT ComicalEngineer
Our local station has legible verbal announcements (automated). Last week the train I was about to catch went from on time to 3 minutes / 4 minutes / 6 minutes then finally 4 minutes late as it came to a stop in the platform. The same system will occasionally give announcements for a train that departed anything up to 15 minutes previously. The trip from the previous station is 8 minutes.
Humans can mess up but to properly screw up ....
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Monday 11th May 2026 16:02 GMT PB90210
The Bakerloo lines will occasionally display trains that should have arrived hours before. District line trains at Hammersmith used to arrive independent of the platform displays (both times and destinations)
I have also been on a 'fully automated' Docklands train being driven manually because the system was showing the same train on the other track travelling in the opposite direction.
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Monday 11th May 2026 17:11 GMT frankyunderwood123
Title change to London transport?
This is very London centric.
I think London should be considered as a different country to the rest of the United Kingdom.
In most places outside London and other large UK cities, there is no effective Public Transport.
That means we don't even get the luxury of the potential of a train arriving.
If you are "lucky" enough to have a train station within reasonable distance of where you live, the chances are it'll be miles from the nearest pub and/or anywhere really.
You then get the pleasure of paying the highest ticket fees in Europe, if not the entire universe, for a service that isn't fit for purpose.
My nearest railway station - and I live in a large town - is inexplicably 6 miles away near a tiny little village.
To walk from that tiny little village to the train station is about 15 minutes and half of the route has no pavements in a 60mph section of road with no street lighting.
Also inexplicably, the last passenger train left the now closed and indeed demolished and built over railway station in my town 60 years ago.
To walk or cycle from my town to that "nearest" railway station is about 2 hours along country roads with no pedestrian infrastructure = risk of death.
Trains at that station cost 10 times more to travel to my nearest city than the local bus costs.
Also, even more inexplicably, it's always raining when I try and walk to a train station - I have no idea why.
Yay Britain! Way To Go!
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Tuesday 12th May 2026 11:02 GMT Ol'Peculier
Re: Title change to London transport?
My local station is a couple of minutes walk from my current, and previous, local. No complaints there.
And the next station on the line has a pub on the platform serving about 15 hand pulled beers :) Have no regrets if I'm on a delayed service getting home...
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Tuesday 12th May 2026 22:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Title change to London transport?
> My local station is a couple of minutes walk from my current, and previous, local. No complaints there.
My local station is right next door to a pub called "The Station". Both the station and The Station were built to serve Victorian day trippers from London.
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Tuesday 12th May 2026 13:16 GMT Potty Professor
Rural transport?
I live in the Welsh Marches. The Cambrian railway station in Oswestry was closed by Dr. Beeching in 1966, and has since been operated as an Heritage Railway. The track to the north of town still exists, and is passable as far as the West Coast Main Line station at Gobowen, approximately 6 miles away, and yet the Dept of Transport say that there is no funding available to operate a shuttle service between the two. Thus there is a fairly large town only six miles from a West Coast Main Line station, and yet no trains!
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Wednesday 13th May 2026 05:11 GMT The Organ Grinder's Monkey
Re: Title change to London transport?
People forget that a good percentage of Britain's railway lines & stations weren't sited to benefit the polloi, they were put there to benefit producers wanting to get their goods to market. Often these producers were gentlemen farmers, which explains the rural stations.
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Monday 11th May 2026 18:27 GMT tin 2
Speaking of information boards that say nothing
Every element of this is very much IIRC. Merseyrail put some information boards in on (at least) the underground part of the service in Liverpool sort of around the late 90s. They were the funky 38 segment LCD things. They never ever managed to get them to say anything about any actual trains coming (or not) - or at least did not manage to do so for many years - and at some point were replaced with presumably something that worked.
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Monday 11th May 2026 20:55 GMT Phil O'Sophical
Re: Speaking of information boards that say nothing
Try https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/, it uses the same information system as the station displays, but your browser will probably have less attention from the bork fairy. It's also very useful for learning which platform your train will leave from before it shows up on the displays, so you can avoid the rush.
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Monday 11th May 2026 18:39 GMT Jou (Mxyzptlk)
Is the time at least correct?
Regulary I see the time being off by 5+ minutes in Stuttgart S-Bahn. Especially funny if: The table, on the in-train display, showing "Arriving at 13:14 at Hauptbahnhof", whereas the time below, on the same screen, says "13:21". Didn't we have an NTP article here lately where three microseconds off was a reason to get kicked from the NTP network?
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Tuesday 12th May 2026 05:35 GMT Jay F
From Three Men in a Boat, 1889. They don't need computers to not know what's going on.
We got to Waterloo at eleven, and asked where the eleven-five started from. Of course nobody knew; nobody at Waterloo ever does know where a train is going to start from, or where a train when it does start is going to, or anything about it. The porter who took our things thought it would go from number two platform, while another porter, with whom he discussed the question, had heard a rumour that it would go from number one. The station-master, on the other hand, was convinced it would start from the local.
To put an end to the matter, we went upstairs, and asked the traffic superintendent, and he told us that he had just met a man, who said he had seen it at number three platform. We went to number three platform, but the authorities there said that they rather thought that train was the Southampton express, or else the Windsor loop. But they were sure it wasn’t the Kingston train, though why they were sure it wasn’t they couldn’t say.
Then our porter said he thought that must be it on the high-level platform; said he thought he knew the train. So we went to the high-level platform, and saw the engine-driver, and asked him if he was going to Kingston. He said he couldn’t say for certain of course, but that he rather thought he was. Anyhow, if he wasn’t the 11.5 for Kingston, he said he was pretty confident he was the 9.32 for Virginia Water, or the 10 a.m. express for the Isle of Wight, or somewhere in that direction, and we should all know when we got there. We slipped half-a-crown into his hand, and begged him to be the 11.5 for Kingston.
“Nobody will ever know, on this line,” we said, “what you are, or where you’re going. You know the way, you slip off quietly and go to Kingston.”
“Well, I don’t know, gents,” replied the noble fellow, “but I suppose some train’s got to go to Kingston; and I’ll do it. Gimme the half-crown.”
Thus we got to Kingston by the London and South-Western Railway.
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Tuesday 12th May 2026 11:59 GMT Edwin
Stockholm has a far more Schröderian bus type
Many of the area's bus stops are adorned with delightfully easy-to-read eInk displays.
However, the system that manages the data on those displays seems unaware of any cancellations, even though it *is* aware if a bus is delayed.
The consequence is that the boards regularly show that the bus will arrive in x minutes, updating regularly only for the bus to inexplicably disappear at the scheduled arrival time.
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Tuesday 12th May 2026 22:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Split flap boards.
> I used to quite like watching those. Being a bit 'strange' I found the sight and sound quite restful - especially the occasional full board refresh.
The sound was extremely useful because you could read a book while waiting for your train and only have to look up when you heard the display start to clack. With the modern screens you have to keep looking up to see if things have changed.
It's almost as if the people who wrote the requirements for the tender for new signs didn't actually use the trains.
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