Inventive station announcements
Commuting at the moment is really irritating. There’s a limited strike on the trains, so while they are still running a service, there are cancellations and delays every day. Instead of taking me less than an hour each way, for the past week the journey has taken more than 90 minutes for a distance of about 12 miles as the crow flies.
Last night, travelling home, I was feeling like it might be my lucky night. The train left on time1, and I settled back enjoying the feeling that I might actually get home at a reasonable hour. Obviously this was a bad idea, and I was enraging the gods of the railway. We waited for ages at New Street station, until the conductor came on the intercom to explain that the train didn’t have a driver. I’m no expert on railway systems, but I’m guessing that having a driver is a big help. There followed a period of a fun game of ‘train musical chairs’ in which people switch between trains because of a rumour that there might be one on the adjacent platform which might be leaving sooner than the one they are on. They then find out that there’s a different problem with that train, and come back again (rinse, repeat).
At some point during all this palaver, I was amused by an announcement made on the central intercom system (by a real person rather than the automated announcements). She apologised for the delay to the train on the adjacent platform, which was apparently due to a ‘difficult shunting procedure’. She started to announce the reason for the delay on the train I was on, but she paused. “The train on platform 8a is delayed because…” I could almost hear the cogs turning in her brain, while she tried to find a plausible excuse.
“Driver eaten by water buffalo?”. No, water buffaloes are a bit too rare in Birmingham. “Driver sucked into a parallel universe by a trans-dimensional vortex?”. Nah, too Star Trek. Hmm, got it!
The intercom clicked back to open, and there was a note of triumph in her voice:
…the driver for that train is involved the difficult shunting procedure on platform 7a.
Absolute geniusâshe managed to cleverly link the two lame excuses into one all-encompassing lame excuse.
1 Well, the train was late, but so was I, so everything was in alignment.
1
I know it's not a Virgin train, but don't forget you can now leave your thoughts at this "have your say" page which must be getting so much venom by now it could restock king cobras. I also wittled on about it here, but I'm sure you already know how much I love trains...
grin----- Hehe
I feel like leaving a complaint on Virgin's page anyway, just for the hell of it. They deserve it.
My current pet hate with Central Trains is the way that the screens say that the train is on time until approximately a minute before it's due to arrive. Then it's billed as being 2 minutes later, when that time arrives, they say it will arrive in the next two minutes, and so on. When it eventually comes 40 minutes later, you realise that if you knew it would be this late in the beginning, you could have got the bus instead and been at work/home 20 minutes earlier. Grrr.
by bsag @ 14/01/2005 10:01 pm • Permalink •
2
I must say I sympathise with your views on the inability of railway companies to supply drivers for trains. I've previously been similarly irked by Air France in this sort of context.
by Simon @ 15/01/2005 3:01 am • Permalink •
3
Central Trains are the bane of my life as well. I travel the Cross City line every day and currently they cannot run a railway because the drivers don't want to work overtime! This week we were dumped off the train in the Bourneville because of a fatality on the line and left to make our own way in to Birmingham Centre. But I still use it everyday!
by nik @ 15/01/2005 5:02 pm • Permalink •
4
Simon: I think I'm lucky not to fly often enough to be irritated by flight delays (though there was one flight back from Münster when I thought I would literally die of boredom).
nik: Fun isn't it? I'm lucky that I can also use the buses, but far too often I wait for ages in expectation of a train when I could already be there on the bus.
by bsag @ 16/01/2005 7:01 pm • Permalink •
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