Phone speaker noise on trains - have we given up completely?

[Bletchleyite]

Last year I treated myself to a business class seat back from the Middle East so I could get some peace and quiet as I had to go straight into work the next day. Of course the row behind me was full of children and their parents had let them loose on their devices without any kind of headphones. Cue an entire flight of beeps and bleeps and no sleep for me...

Note to self: avoid planes at the end of half term.

Unless the culture there is different on such things and it was a Middle East airline, wouldn't a quiet word with the cabin crew have resolved that? Planes are a far more supervised environment than trains, and I would certainly on the likes of BA expect this to be dealt with, particularly overnight.

 

[kristiang85]

Unless the culture there is different on such things and it was a Middle East airline, wouldn't a quiet word with the cabin crew have resolved that? Planes are a far more supervised environment than trains, and I would certainly on the likes of BA expect this to be dealt with, particularly overnight.

It was Turkish airlines, and it is so obvious on a plane when you ask cabin crew to deal with something, that I just don't like the aggro when stuck on a metal tube with people for hours.

 

[Bletchleyite]

It was Turkish airlines, and it is so obvious on a plane when you ask cabin crew to deal with something, that I just don't like the aggro when stuck on a metal tube with people for hours.

TBH I'm astonished cabin crew didn't intervene without being asked, I'd expect that on BA or easyJet. Maybe their culture is different on such things.

 

[kristiang85]

TBH I'm astonished cabin crew didn't intervene without being asked, I'd expect that on BA or easyJet. Maybe their culture is different on such things.

They were also walking the cabin much less "due to COVID" at the time (Turkish were terrible for that).

 

[BRX]

A few people have mentioned that this encourages people to travel by car rather than train - and this is one of the things that bothers me about it, apart from the annoyance to me personally.

You're not going to persuade people to use public transport more, without some attention being given to the environment in which they travel. It's long been the case that one of the attractions of the private car is that you can pretty much completely isolate yourself from other humans and their annoying habits. Allowing this kind of behaviour only magnifies this difference between modes of travel.

A few comments upthread have been along the lines of, if you don't like it, drive. Well, not everyone has that option. They have to rely on public transport and why should they have to tolerate this kind of travel environment while the more privileged can enjoy the peace and quiet of their private car.

The idea of reducing the number of unnecessary tannoy announcements is welcome - and seems to recognise that noise pollution is a significant part of the passenger experience - but I'd much rather that the issue of passenger-generated noise is addressed with the greater priority.

We've had the "rail sale" with the stated aim of getting people back to using trains. But I wonder how many people, who've barely used the train in the last few years, have taken advantage of that offer, done a journey and found themselves surrounded by a cacophony of music videos, tiktok clips, youtube videos and speakerphone calls and though "nope, I'll stick with my car in future".

 

[Paul Jones 88]

Staff should be allowed to destroy offending devices with a hammer.

 

[Big Jumby 74]

Staff should be allowed to destroy offending devices with a hammer.

Been there, done that, but before anyone shouts, it was my own phone which wasn't co-operating with me, so (in the privacy of my own back yard) in a moment of madness, it met its death. Having removed the sim card, only afterwards did I realise my contacts were on the phone....
But it did feel very liberating for a while I have to say!

 

[Bikeman78]

On planes I think the much louder engine noise prevents people from trying to listen to content without headphones.

Sitting in the motor car of 317343 has the same effect! No noise pollution apart from DC motor thrash.

 

[londonbridge]

You are aware of Railway Byelaw 7.1, right? Here it is.

7. Music, sound, advertising and carrying on a trade​

1. except with written permission from an operator no person on the railway shall, to the annoyance of any person:
   1. sing or
   2. use any instrument, article or equipment for the production or reproduction of sound

So yes, I actually do have more rights than someone using such a device, because if it annoys me (and it will, I can assure you) then they are committing an offence.

The layman probably doesn’t even know about railway byelaws nor care about them. We’ve all seen people pushing their way onto the train whilst others are still getting off, blissfully unaware that they’re in breach by doing so.

You never know when someone can turn violent these days either, or at least threaten you.

Indeed, I recently saw someone being threatened with violence and called a c*nt for challenging a couple who had arrived at the bus stop at the last minute and pushed in front of those who had been queuing.

Also recently I was on an overnight national express where a couple were constantly talking to the point where the driver asked them to keep it down as others might be trying to sleep. They quietened down for a bit, then the volume gradually crept up again until he threatened to remove them from the coach at the next services.

 

[Bikeman78]

Unless the culture there is different on such things and it was a Middle East airline, wouldn't a quiet word with the cabin crew have resolved that? Planes are a far more supervised environment than trains, and I would certainly on the likes of BA expect this to be dealt with, particularly overnight.

Coming back from the Middle East would probably be a daytime flight. My kids would zonk out on an overnight flight. On the last long haul we did before Covid, my son was completely out of it until well after we landed. Only woke him up after most people had got off.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Also recently I was on an overnight national express where a couple were constantly talking to the point where the driver asked them to keep it down as others might be trying to sleep. They quietened down for a bit, then the volume gradually crept up again until he threatened to remove them from the coach at the next services.

It's interesting that coach drivers are generally not at all reticent of enforcing against bad behaviour despite typically not having a second member of staff they could call on if things went really bad. One of the more memorable ones was a Scottish NatEx driver who stopped the coach, walked up to someone, grabbed their portion of chips, wrapped them up and chucked them in the locker while ranting in broad Glaswegian that "ye shouldnae brang chaps on the cooch, at wood stank the cooch oot".

 

[jh64]

It could always be worse, you could be stuck in the sky with this racket:

https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1515284320184934403

EDIT for description: Link to a video of someone playing an acoustic guitar at unimpressed passengers on a plane.

 

[Markdvdman]

Not trains - but I hate the noise youngsters playing them blasting on their phones! The speaker quality is horrendous! The speakers on my Samsung S21 Ultra are good but never would I listen to music on them! On a National Express Coach IF somebody is constantly on their phone they tell them to get off it and message them as it is not fair to other passengers. I find that annoying too. When you travel you do not ALWAYS want to listen to music or watch anything!

 

[Bletchleyite]

It could always be worse, you could be stuck in the sky with this racket:

https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1515284320184934403

EDIT for description: Link to a video of someone playing an acoustic guitar at unimpressed passengers on a plane.

I would rather that (provided they could play and sing OK) than tinny rubbish on a phone speaker.

 

[Chucky]

I was on an Avanti service in Standard Premium recently and there were two lads in their mid twenties in there playing grime music with pretty colourful lyrics as a high volume from London to Liverpool. The TM walked past them numerous times and didn't say anything about it. I'm not sure why he walked up and down so many times because he didn't bother checking anyone's ticket!

 

[jon0844]

The plane I was on the other day had several people around me listening to content without headphones, they just turn the volume up to compensate

Mobile devices produce much better (and louder) sound now than they used to, so this problem is only going to get worse.

Indeed phones do have better speakers now, even cheaper phones, but I didn't think they'd be good enough for using on a plane.

I've not flown since 2020 (when previously I flew many times a year, albeit usually short haul) and I guess things have changed.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I was on an Avanti service in Standard Premium recently and there were two lads in their mid twenties in there playing grime music with pretty colourful lyrics as a high volume from London to Liverpool. The TM walked past them numerous times and didn't say anything about it. I'm not sure why he walked up and down so many times because he didn't bother checking anyone's ticket!

I would say traincrew should definitely intervene on the likes of profane lyrics and pornography played out loud as that is even more likely to cause offence or upset.

 

[Iskra]

It's very much 'youth culture'. One of the trains I've had the 'pleasure' of getting on a morning is the Hogwarts Express. Getting those morning school run trains really is an eye opener. Music blaring is probably the last of your worries.

Which, on the flip side, brings you to adult behaviour on trains. Getting a 'vomit comet' back from London on a Saturday night is another eye opener. The theatre crowd is just as vocal as the football fans. The drunks are a nightmare but the Friday night after work club is just as hellish. That juxtaposition of cultures is what creates this annoyance with each other. We can all hide behind 'manners' and 'society' but its the same cat skinned many different ways. There is just a clash where people do not want to accept each other.




Which is entirely subjective.

It’s not just young peope, plenty of older people sit and watch youtube/tiktok videos without headphones in public places, I see this everyday. They are also the ones who have annoyingly loud ringtones and don’t understand the concept of vibrate mode. It’s not an age thing, it’s a selfishness/lack of self-awareness thing- there are a large number of people who believe they are the only person in the world and that nobody else matters.

To counter this, on annoying journeys I sometimes put my Beatz on without even having any music on myself, which softens the sound at least. This also defeats the people who want to be my adoptive best mate for a 3 hour journey and who don’t understand polite social norms for closing an unwanted conversation down.

 

[Matt_pool]

I was on a Northern 195 from Sheffield to Manchester last October and it was a nice sunny day so I spent the journey looking out the window at the scenery. Then at Edale an elderly man in his 70's gets on the train, sits in the airline seats directly in front of me, and proceeds to watch Only Fools And Horses on his phone with the volume turned right up.

At first I thought it was quite funny, but after 10 minutes it got very annoying. Then a man on the other side of the carriage stands up in the aisle and says to the elderly man "do you have to!?", then he stormed off down the carriage. It worked though because the elderly man muttered something and turned the volume down.

A few weeks later I was on a Northern 150 from Lime Street. The carriage was empty, until an elderly woman gets on and sits adjacent to me, gets her phone out and starts watching Bullseye "Iiin one. Iiin two, and Bully's Special Prize..." (you get the picture) with the volume turned right up! Again I thought it was funny but it did start to get annoying, but fortunately I was getting off at the next stop.

Then there was the time when I was on a train from Torquay to Exeter and a group of teenagers were playing some awful music on a mobile phone. This was 15 years ago so you can imagine the sound quality was a lot worse than the tinny sound mobile phones make these days. After about 10 minutes I shouted down the carriage (I was right at the front and they were half way down) "Turn that cr*p off!". And they did.

 

[BeijingDave]

I've asked people to turn it off in the past, most of them have been quite rude as a result. They're the sort of people who don't give two hoots about anyone else, I suspect. Morons.

Yes, this is the problem. People have been rude to me so often, even in the quiet carriage, and actually no one has backed me up, so I have stopped doing it and converted to noise cancelling earphones.

I love travelling Business Class on planes (when I can afford it) because the staff will actually crack down on that in Business Class. And on KLM from PVG-Amsterdam in Economy I was surrounded by such a noisy family with their unruly brats climbing everywhere that I got moved up to seat 1A when I complained!

 

[Chucky]

I would say traincrew should definitely intervene on the likes of profane lyrics and pornography played out loud as that is even more likely to cause offence or upset.

I agree. The fact the TM didn't seem to mind didn't instill much faith that I'd get backup if I said anything. The coach was half full but aside from to two with the music the rest of us were down the other end! Like others on this thread, I carry headphones for the purpose of drowning out unwanted background noise so I didn't think it was worth getting into a confrontation about.

 

[robert thomas]

Some years ago when Great Western HSTs had a quiet carriage a smartly dressed gentleman phoned his wife and started a domestic argument.He got louder and louder despite disapproving looks from all round the carriage. Eventually he bellowed "am I being unreasonable ?" into the phone. The entire carriage replied yes and the conversation ended abruptly.

 

[Dougal2345]

I feel that the noisy environment on trains is partly caused by the noisy air-conditioning and other mechanical background noise that seems to be accepted these days.

If people are travelling in a coach that is genuinely almost silent - like a Desiro when the air-conditioning has failed - then they will generally talk to each other in low voices.

If they are in a coach where there is basically a vacuum-cleaner running three feet from their ears (like a Desiro 99.9% of the time) then everything else gets louder - their voices, the likelihood of someone turning their music up.

If we want our trains to be library-like environments (and I certainly wouldn't mind), then they have to be quiet to begin with. Most people in libraries wouldn't be pleased if the cleaning staff turned up during working hours with a small fleet of Henry Hoovers.

 

[weepingwillowb]

It's interesting that coach drivers are generally not at all reticent of enforcing against bad behaviour despite typically not having a second member of staff they could call on if things went really bad. One of the more memorable ones was a Scottish NatEx driver who stopped the coach, walked up to someone, grabbed their portion of chips, wrapped them up and chucked them in the locker while ranting in broad Glaswegian that "ye shouldnae brang chaps on the cooch, at wood stank the cooch oot".

Possibly the same driver of the NatEx coach I was on recently, that shouted at a passenger who was talking loudly on his phone two rows back from the driver, "Turn that phone off, it's past midnight." Result - silence.

But the coach I was on last Sunday, travelling home from Birmingham, was the final straw. At the end of a long day I was tired and a bit cranky, so after a young guy sat two rows behind me started a phone call at Mancester Airport and didn't finish it until after the coach had passed through Salford, that's telling me never to travel home on a nighttime National Express service. In future I'll pay for an overnight stay in a hotel and travel home the next day.

The weird thing is that I caught the 23:22 train from Marylebone to High Wycombe last Friday, and I didn't hear any music or videos being played in the carriage I was in - no loud voices, no shouting - it seemed to be very civilised.

 

[D6975]

Why is it that the individuals who indulge in such anti-social behaviour always have such appalling taste in music? You never hear Pink Floyd or Tom Petty or Beethoven or Mozart. Always absolute rubbish, frequently with bad language.

 

[trainophile]

And that dreadful “rap” stuff. Sung by morons for morons.

 

[Bletchleyite]

The weird thing is that I caught the 23:22 train from Marylebone to High Wycombe last Friday, and I didn't hear any music or videos being played in the carriage I was in - no loud voices, no shouting - it seemed to be very civilised.

Late evening south WCML services are also quite civilised, Friday isn't really a heavy drinking day. It's only unpleasant on a Saturday from about 2100 to about 2300. The 0015 is mostly full of people asleep. The worst behaviour I find seems to be up North, which I find sad as it's not the friendly North I left 20 years ago.

 

[AlterEgo]

At present it's only an offence if the sound is to someone's annoyance. Thus it can't be enforced without someone complaining unless the staff themselves are genuinely annoyed by it, which is probably not the case unless it's right next to the cab.

Whereas I feel that it should be an offence to play sound out loud intentionally regardless of who it does or doesn't affect, as complaining about another passenger can lead to serious awkwardness or worse.

You don't need a Bylaw. Do that in a restaurant and you'll get kicked out.

And as others have pointed out, Bylaws are frequently not enforced. Just get some staff with guts and turf people off if they're being inconsiderate.

 

[AndyMike]

A few people have mentioned that this encourages people to travel by car rather than train - and this is one of the things that bothers me about it, apart from the annoyance to me personally.

You're not going to persuade people to use public transport more, without some attention being given to the environment in which they travel. It's long been the case that one of the attractions of the private car is that you can pretty much completely isolate yourself from other humans and their annoying habits. Allowing this kind of behaviour only magnifies this difference between modes of travel.

A few comments upthread have been along the lines of, if you don't like it, drive. Well, not everyone has that option. They have to rely on public transport and why should they have to tolerate this kind of travel environment while the more privileged can enjoy the peace and quiet of their private car.

The idea of reducing the number of unnecessary tannoy announcements is welcome - and seems to recognise that noise pollution is a significant part of the passenger experience - but I'd much rather that the issue of passenger-generated noise is addressed with the greater priority.

We've had the "rail sale" with the stated aim of getting people back to using trains. But I wonder how many people, who've barely used the train in the last few years, have taken advantage of that offer, done a journey and found themselves surrounded by a cacophony of music videos, tiktok clips, youtube videos and speakerphone calls and though "nope, I'll stick with my car in future".

Thank you for ‘getting it’. Train staff should take a more pro-active approach to reducing this - now increasingly prevalent - nuisance as they walk through trains. If they can ask people to take their feet off the seats, they can gently do this.

 

[stuu]

Why is it that the individuals who indulge in such anti-social behaviour always have such appalling taste in music? You never hear Pink Floyd or Tom Petty or Beethoven or Mozart. Always absolute rubbish, frequently with bad language.

It's the same as car stereos, the volume always correlates with the crapness of the music. Louder=worse