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Random ScotRail Apology Generator
- jjp 4y agoSome back story and previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32536808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32536808
- iamtedd 4y agoI'm amazed at the specificity of some excuses. I got "a road vehicle colliding with a bridge earlier on this train's journey", and (forgot the actual text) "a bicycle on the rail earlier on this train's journey".
- DominikPeters 4y agoHere you can browse the list of all reasons: https://scotrail.datasette.io/scotrail?sql=++++select+Transcription%2C+mp3+from+announcements+where%0D%0A++++++++Category+%3D+%27Reason%27 https://scotrail.datasette.io/scotrail?sql=++++select+Transc...
- abliefern 4y agoThank God they differentiate between "A fire near the railway involving gas cylinders" and "A fire near the railway suspected to involve gas cylinders" how else would I be able to sleep at night.
- mytailorisrich 4y agoThis sort of things is even 'funnier' when you realise that there must have been a whole discussion on this specific issue in one or several meetings.
- jjp 4y agoI wonder how much of the message is for train and station staff, like Inspector Sands, as much as for passengers.
- goosedragons 4y agoFirst one I got was "overcrowding because of a rugby match", they also have overcrowding because of a marathon, a football match, a sporting event, a concert and just general overcrowding and overcrowding because there's not enough cars as usual.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y agoI have to wonder how they devised the list to be recorded. Perhaps they have a list of every reason a train has ever been delayed and they used that.
- avianlyric 4y agoSome interesting research, which I think TfL did, basically says that people are more understanding of delays etc if they’re given the actual reason why a delay occurred. After all you’re much more likely to forgive ScotRail for getting home late if you’re told your train was delayed due to someone leaving a bike on the track, than you’re if you’re told nothing. A lack of explanation just comes across as either indifference to your situation, or incompetence. Neither is a good look.
- benj111 4y agoUnless the reason is leaves on the line, or the wrong kind of snow.
- avianlyric 4y agoLeaves are surprisingly tricky. Trains mulch them into a hard slippery varnish on the rails, which is then extremely difficult to remove (current best methods involve industrial lasers). The slippery varnish substantially reduces breaking performance, and increases breaking distances. That in turn means all of your safety margins vanish, and it’s no longer possible to operate trains at full speed, and at normal follow distances. All of that in turn means delays on an individual train basis, but also lower network capacity. Given that most of the UKs commuter rail operates at 80%+ capacity (basically the limit, before minor failures consistently result in catastrophic cascading failures), the result is that leaves on the rails is actually a pretty serious problem that’s tricky to solve.
- benj111 4y agoWhat about some kind of shovel or air blower to remove the leaves before they compress. I don't deny it's an issue. But it happens every year. It's like having trains that can't run when it rains.
- avianlyric 4y agoYou would have to equip every train with that system, leaf fall during Autumn in the UK is surprisingly high, so cleaning once a day wouldn't even be close to good enough. Many councils increase their street cleaning 4x just to deal with leaves. Not to mention that wet leaves are surprisingly heavy and sticky, so you might need a pretty complicated system to reliably remove leaves on a train moving at full line speed. At the end of the day, leaves cause issues for about four weeks out of every year. That makes it tricky to justify adding thousands of pounds of specialised equipment to every train, just to deal with four weeks. Of course, you could find a solution to all these things, and have far more reliable trains. But the cost would be high, and it would require our government to actually want reliable public transport. So far, all the evidence suggests our government is only interested in subsiding private vehicles, because public transport "doesn't return a profit".
- samwillis 4y agoThe background here is that someone did a FOI request for the announcement audio, crowdsourced transcriptions, and various things have been built on top of it. Related previous posts: “Ambient Scotrail Beats – Relax to Scottish train announcements over low-fi beats” - from the original FIO requester, covers details of background and crowd sourcing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535491 “Hacking around with the ScotRail audio announcements” - this “datasette” from the creator of Datasette Simon Willison: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32536808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32536808 (Slight aside Datasette is an awesome tool for publishing and exploring these sort of datasets)
- mellosouls 4y agoThe background here is that someone did a FOI request for the announcement audio Whatever the other merits of this project, I'd like to know the motivation behind the FOI - I really dislike it being used for trivial reasons.
- dvdkon 4y agoPresumably, a train fan wanted to play with announcement audio. Is that not reason enough? I'd try it myself, but local train station announcement systems are commercial software that's licenced by the central rail authority, so I suppose it wouldn't work.
- JoshTriplett 4y agoLiterally everything that is available via FOI should just be posted online proactively.
- sokoloff 4y agoCuration would become a problem (maybe even to the point of requiring more resources in aggregate than complying with current FOI/FIOA requests).
- 4y ago
- navigate8310 4y agoWe are sorry to announce that Virgin Trains East Coast service to Carluke has been cancelled due to A train not stopping in the correct position at a station.
- jotm 4y agoA Train is asshoe
- jotm 4y agoNow do one for Deutsche Bahn :D There was some news a few weeks ago where DB was saying train delays/cancellations were due to sabotage. Probably by Russian agents. Sure thing DB.
- Xylakant 4y agoThere’s absolutely enough to blame the DB for, but the sabotage was a real thing - unless you want to imply that the federal police is lying. Source (in German): https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/bahn-sabotage-101.html https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/bahn-sabotage-101.html
- captainmuon 4y agoDeutsche Bahn has some announcements which are amazingly unspecific (something like "[the delay] is due to delays in the operating sequence"). They also have multiple euphemisms for accidents/suicide (translated it would be something like "personal injury at the track, personal injury IN the track, emergency doctor deployed at the track"). If they were to record the announcements today, maybe they should add one for sabotage and one for stolen overhead lines...
- iggldiggl 4y agoRelatively recently they switched from announcing track/train/signalling/overhead line/… failures to announcing everything as "repairs". I suppose the hope was that that would make them sound more proactive (look, we're already repairing the failure), but in practice those new phrasings often just sound silly. > Deutsche Bahn has some announcements which are amazingly unspecific (something like "[the delay] is due to delays in the operating sequence") And the local public transport operator (buses/trams) uses "operational reasons" as a euphemism for "lack of drivers".
- gorgoiler 4y agoI note that the cancellation is in three parts: “has been cancelled”, “due to” and finally the reason, each said in slightly different ways. Why not just say “…has been cancelled” and then announce the reason with a single, complete sentence in a longer piece of audio?: “This is due to livestock on the track.”, “This is due to a staffing shortage.”, etc I get that it’s impossible to foresee everything the system might have to say and to record all announcements in one sitting with the same person in exactly the same way. However, is there an important technical reason for why these systems break up sentences so that they are spoken by different people?
- rippercushions 4y agoBecause it wouldn't sound like an official robot announcement without the awkward pauses. On the Jakarta metro, most stations have a sponsor's name attached to them. The sponsors change every now and then, so the new names have to switched in, but they put zero effort into equalizing the audio. So you get treated to (lovely female voice) "Stesen berikutnya, Lebak Bulus" (dude yelling) "GRAB". (lady) "Lebak Bulus" (dude again) "GRAB."
- avianlyric 4y agoThat’s because the SQL powering this demo only selects the “has been cancelled” announcement section. Presumably they have other snippets they can put in there like “has been delayed”, or “has terminated early” etc. Depending on the nature of the incident, you may not have, or need, a reason. It’s probably not worth putting a reason in if the train has only bee delay 5 mins, you may not even know the reason for the delay in time for the announcement.
- gorgoiler 4y agoThe goal is to avoid as many mid sentence voice changes as possible. That’s hard if your announcement is one sentence: The X service from A to B has been Y’d due to Z I’m wondering if, instead, the announcement could be: The X service from A to B has been Y’d. This is due to Z. I’ve said this before — there aren’t that many different train services. You could record every version of both sentences in full, and almost certainly record every version of every sentence in full by the same person in a tractable amount of time. I don’t think the problem scales as much as these engineers think it does.
- TwoNineFive 4y agoAnyone here spend at least an hour laughing at the abuse-a-tron in the late 90s? I think this is it but it's been forever. https://members.tripod.com/Koolkat_2/ABUSE.HTML https://members.tripod.com/Koolkat_2/ABUSE.HTML