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Train announcements

The response from ATOC is typical of railway complacency; they should shut up and listen for a change. Yes, there are some announcements that are simply not needed. Many others are uneducated and ungrammatical: trains arrive AT stations, for example, not INTO them; inconvenience is caused to people, not to their journeys; the thing we travel on is a train, not a 'service' (which is a series or collection of similar train journeys).

We are frequently offered a 'fully-licenced bar' for sale, along with sandwiches, snacks, etc.; I'd love one, but it would be a struggle to get it home! Yes, tell us which station we're approaching, and, as I recently heard in an excellent announcement on a late-running train arriving at Birmingham, which connections were at which platforms, and which had left already (and the details of the next train to the same destinations – full marks for that!).

Also, as a signal engineer, I'm sick and tired of every delay being attributed to 'signal failure', or 'signalling problems', when there is usually nothing wrong with the signalling at all – at most, it's normally just a signal at danger due to a train (either the one being delayed or another) in the wrong place at the wrong time. There some very good examples of on-train announcements, but most of them need to improve considerably –and, yes, they DO often ruin journeys.

[Editor’s note: Some good news on this today, with First Great Western agreeing to alter its on-board messages to get rid of “all the tosh – the redundant, the irrelevant and the repetitive”.]

Re: Train announcements ‘ruining journeys’ – Baker