Recent content by Via Bank

If it’s just a spelling error, Eurostar’s advice is specifically just to turn up and travel as normal. The advice for travel agents (see page 7) seems to be that errors up to 3 characters, or wrong title (e.g. Miss instead of Mrs) won’t cause any issues.

Well, this is it, isn’t it? There is a culture of “put something—anything—against that line in the risk assessment” without due regard to whether it’s actually going to fix the problem. The cheapest option is to just add a line on the CIS. And if it means information overload? Well, no-one at...

Hey, at least the outside sign with the backlit double arrow is RA2. That’s quite smart. Everything else: no. Just no.

They've been out on the International branch all weekend. Don't know if they're the same units that were already in service or if they're taking some of the other units out.

Yes there are, but realistically you are vanishingly unlikely to be stood at International and choose to get a different train or abandon your journey based on whether or not a tube line at the other end is working or not. I strongly believe that most people will only make any changes to their...

Extra noise that is wholly unnecessary. It’s different if you’re (eg) at Guildford or Wimbledon or Dartford where it might change which train you board or which terminal you go to, but entirely unnecessary for long-distance connections. The only circumstance in which I guess it might make a...

After many appalling experiences with replacement buses/coaches on the South Western if we’re visiting family and there are no direct trains, we now get National Express instead. At least that way the driver will be courteous and professional. No doubt if we had a car, we would drive instead.

I do get the impression that it is more common on the continent, where dynamo lighting setups are more common, to see people walking their cycles along the platform or boarding trains with the lights still turned on and even flashing as they do when you roll the bike along at low speed...

Well, it should be, and if it isn’t possible that’s a failure of the system design.

There is at least one, possibly two, out in service on the International branch on a regular basis now. There was at least one on crew training today as well.

At first glance this looks basically the same as SBB EasyRide, ÖBB SimplyGo, etc. Both of which work perfectly well… but also work across all modes across the whole country, in countries that don’t tend to use ticket gates.

DB’s current preferred terminology, at least in an ICE context, appears to be “Lokführer:in” (loco leader/driver) and “Zugchef:in” (train manager/train captain.)

A new video shows a mix of text-to-speech announcements and pre-recorded ones (e.g. for interchanges at Canning Town, presumably with the intention eventually of also advertising “change here for City Hall”): One presumes that they're still not satisfied yet with how the TTS sounds, or their...

I assume that RAIB will take this information into account in their report (as they have in the past when it comes to interactions with the public highway and people getting hit by trains/trams) although I also fully expect that Amazon will be "nothing to do with us guv" and will have...

Right now it seems to be at the discretion of whoever’s monitoring the situation in the departures lounge. Yesterday we weren’t called until 20 minutes before departure (with a not-especially busy departures hall and 1 train due for departure), but last month I was called 25 minutes before...