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Archive: national-rail-enquiries

Why do railway companies talk like this?

12 October 2011 22:57

Categories: *, Commuting, Current affairs, Scotland

There are lots of great things about the railway, but the industry’s use of language is not one of them.

I have often been amazed by the linguistic tangles conductors often find themselves in when they try to “talk posh” during announcements. Clearly they are not trained about the importance of plain English. This problem was covered excellently by the Guardian’s Mind Your Langauge blog calling for railspeak to be terminated.

Another recent article on the BBC News website looked over some of the dodgy phrasing of railway delay excuses. The cryptic but common explanations include “tanking train toilet” (the loos won’t flush) and “poor railhead adhesion” (the track is slippery).

On the ubiquitous “signalling problems”, the article notes that this is usually caused by cable theft.

I don’t know why they don’t say ‘It’s because some so-and-so has stolen 150 yards of cable.’ That’s going to get people on-side.

This evening my eyebrows were raised by a tweet I spotted from the National Rail Enquiries ScotRail Twitter feed.

DISRUPTION CLEARED: Trains are now running normally between Edinburgh and Glasgow Queen Street / Stirling #fb
12 October 2011 21:40 via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite
@NRE_ScotRail
National Rail

This “DISRUPTION CLEARED” is a dead body. It can’t just be me that feels that there could be a more sensitive way of describing this than “DISRUPTION CLEARED”.

6 comments

More on the National Rail gadget

14 October 2007 22:56

Categories: Commuting, Edinburgh, General, Scotland, Technology

A few days back I wrote about a neat Windows Gadget that tells you how the trains are running. I was quite enthusiastic about it then, but it turns out I didn’t know the half of it!

Here are some of the neat features that I have discovered since I wrote that post.

  • Colour coding: trains running on time display the expected arrival time in grey. Slightly late-running trains are in yellow, while very late-running trains are in red.
  • If a train is cancelled, you certainly know about it. The background turns red, and it displays in bold writing: ‘Cancelled’. Clicking on it gives you the reason for the cancellation.
  • Service disruption alerts. A little envelope with an exclamation mark appeared. I clicked on it, and it displayed the following message:

    Train services between Edinburgh and Dunbar, and between Edinburgh and North Berwick are being disrupted due to a derailed freight train.

This Windows Gadget certainly isn’t a half-arsed effort. The information it conveys is incredibly detailed.

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At last — a useful Windows Sidebar Gadget

11 October 2007 02:08

Categories: Commuting, Current affairs, Edinburgh, Fife, General, Internet, Personal, Scotland, Technology

If you are a user of Windows Vista, you will no doubt be aware of Windows Gadgets. For the uninitiated, they are basically tiny little applications that run on your desktop (you might also know them as widgets or, in the world of Facebook, applications). You will also be aware that none of the sidebar gadgets in existence are actually useful.

Yeah, there’s that massive oversized analogue clock. And there’s that calendar that doesn’t do anything except tell you what the date is. Then there is the RSS reader that only allows you to subscribe to certain Microsoft feeds. The only really useful one that came as a default on Vista is the post-it note style thing. But apart from that, unless you really like currency converters, there was not much to get stuck into.

There isn’t even anything decent among the third-party efforts. The only good one is iTunes Accessory. Almost all of the others are banal and pointless.

This always struck me as a bit weird. After all, there seem to be a lot of good widgets available for Mac OS X. And even when you look at the wonderful and varied ways that Facebook Applications have been used, the world of Windows Sidebar Gadgets is startlingly stagnant.

But yesterday I discovered a truly useful and surprisingly well-executed Gadget made by National Rail Enquiries. Once you install the gadget, you simply type in your start station (and, optionally, your destination station) and up pops a list of how the trains are running. Essentially, it is the live departure boards feature of the National Rail website, just sitting there in the corner ready for me to glance at.

I already put it to good use yesterday, in my little game of chicken (what’s the latest train I dare to get?). I couldn’t decide which between two trains I should get. But when the earlier one started to run late, I decided I had better stay on the safe side and get the earlier one.

The gadget could do with a couple of extra features. Clicking on a journey brings up a larger screen with details on the expected journey times — but only from your station onwards (eg., I get a table of all the stations between Kirkcaldy and Edinburgh Waverley). But I usually like to see how the train has been running at stations prior to Kirkcaldy to give me a better idea of the journey’s history. I always get the impression that the journey estimates are a little on the optimistic side, and I’d rather like to see the cold, hard facts of how the train has actually been getting along.

But I can’t complain too much. As I said, it is just amazing enough that such a useful gadget has finally been made, and by National Rail Enquiries of all people! I get the feeling that it is going unnoticed (apparently it’s been around since July, and I’ve only just found out about it). If you are a regular train user and have Windows Vista, you probably ought to install it.

3 comments