Confusing announcements on Northern

[BG2024]

At some point in the last few months, Northern seem to have introduced a new automated announcement along the lines of:

"Your attention please. This service will now terminate at {station}. Northern apologises for any inconvenience this may cause".

Unfortunately, I've heard it used repeatedly where the station they are apologising for terminating at is actually the station it was always supposed to terminate at! It just seems to kick in automatically whenever there are any changes to the station calls.

Typical example: Manchester Airport to Liverpool Lime Street service is late departing, so they skip the first few stations between the airport and Manchester Piccadilly. At every remaining station, we get the announcement "apologising" for the train now terminating at Lime Street. At best, it's weird and annoying. At worst, I've seen people leave the train because they've assumed the message means the train is now direct to Lime Street and skipping all stops on the way (don't worry, I called after them to get them back on board!).

Has anyone else come across this? I want to flag it with Northern but I've got no idea who to go to.

 

[TrainzBK]

You’re best to flag it with Northern social teams who will then forward it to the relevant team however I believe they are already aware of this issue as well as a few other issues cureently.

 

[TUC]

In the event of an actual early termination, as opposed to the example above, surely such announcements should far preferably be given manually as there is better chance for the conductor to advise on alternative services, plus the extra reassurance for passengers of knowing there is a 'real human' aware of their situation.

 

[FrontSideBus]

First time I heard that was when going Manchester airport back to Lime street. Started skipping a few stations but then it said the service is terminating at Oxford road! We all got kicked off and the train ran to Liverpool empty....

 

[styles]

In the event of an actual early termination, as opposed to the example above, surely such announcements should far preferably be given manually as there is better chance for the conductor to advise on alternative services, plus the extra reassurance for passengers of knowing there is a 'real human' aware of their situation.

Probably, and as noted a few times on these forums, people can tune out of automated announcements quite often. Though I imagine if the rest of your carriage got up and started collecting their belongings, you might take notice!

 

[trainophile]

At some point in the last few months, Northern seem to have introduced a new automated announcement along the lines of:

"Your attention please. This service will now terminate at {station}. Northern apologises for any inconvenience this may cause".

Unfortunately, I've heard it used repeatedly where the station they are apologising for terminating at is actually the station it was always supposed to terminate at! It just seems to kick in automatically whenever there are any changes to the station calls.

Typical example: Manchester Airport to Liverpool Lime Street service is late departing, so they skip the first few stations between the airport and Manchester Piccadilly. At every remaining station, we get the announcement "apologising" for the train now terminating at Lime Street. At best, it's weird and annoying. At worst, I've seen people leave the train because they've assumed the message means the train is now direct to Lime Street and skipping all stops on the way (don't worry, I called after them to get them back on board!).

Has anyone else come across this? I want to flag it with Northern but I've got no idea who to go to.

I've heard this on a Lime Street to Blackpool North train. Quite amusing apologising for terminating at BPN given the varied reputation of the place!

 

[Peter749]

When I travelled on a Pendolino Manchester to Milton Keynes (Euston) the automated system said "Welcome Aboard this Avanti West Coast Service to . . . . ."

The TM was doing the Announcements - presume the system had not downloaded the info?

 

[trainophile]

When I travelled on a Pendolino Manchester to Milton Keynes (Euston) the automated system said "Welcome Aboard this Avanti West Coast Service to . . . . ."

The TM was doing the Announcements - presume the system had not downloaded the info?

Oh yes, and the Avanti ones that say "we will be calling at..." then nothing. You have to guess where you'll be calling at.

 

[Lewisham2221]

In the event of an actual early termination, as opposed to the example above, surely such announcements should far preferably be given manually as there is better chance for the conductor to advise on alternative services, plus the extra reassurance for passengers of knowing there is a 'real human' aware of their situation.

Yes, you'd want a manual announcement, but surely it's better for the auto-announcer to do it as well, rather than continuing to announce the incorrect terminus?

 

[TUC]

Yes, you'd want a manual announcement, but surely it's better for the auto-announcer to do it as well, rather than continuing to announce the incorrect terminus?

Just turn off the auto announcement.

 

[py_megapixel]

Just turn off the auto announcement.

Turning off the auto announcer means no visual information at all, which of course is problematic for those who can't hear the announcements. Also, ad-hoc manual announcements can be difficult to understand for a myriad of reasons relating to how well the guard's microphone is working and how loudly/quickly they speak. Meanwhile the auto announcements tend to be reasonably high-quality studio recordings (although perhaps not in the case of Northern, who seem to have spent the last year or so proudly making their auto announcements as distorted and badly stitched together as possible...)

Making the auto announcer capable of handling more situations such as this is absolutely a positive development - but of course it's undermined if they set it up badly, as appears to be the case here. That's not to say the auto announcer can't be supplemented by manual announcements where appropriate. But disabling it altogether should only ever be a last resort, if it's providing incorrect or misleading information and there is no way to put it right. It certainly shouldn't be the default policy for relatively standard situations such as a cancelled station call.

 

[Fadd551]

The same announcements happen regularly on the Manchester Airport - Barrow trains, when they skip Deansgate due to overcrowding. Very tedious when you've heard it for the 10th time!

Another auto announcement that has been broken recently is something like "This is {station}, where this train terminates [long pause] which is our final stop."

 

[TrainzBK]

Turning off the auto announcer means no visual information at all, which of course is problematic for those who can't hear the announcements. Also, ad-hoc manual announcements can be difficult to understand for a myriad of reasons relating to how well the guard's microphone is working and how loudly/quickly they speak. Meanwhile the auto announcements tend to be reasonably high-quality studio recordings (although perhaps not in the case of Northern, who seem to have spent the last year or so proudly making their auto announcements as distorted and badly stitched together as possible...)

Making the auto announcer capable of handling more situations such as this is absolutely a positive development - but of course it's undermined if they set it up badly, as appears to be the case here. That's not to say the auto announcer can't be supplemented by manual announcements where appropriate. But disabling it altogether should only ever be a last resort, if it's providing incorrect or misleading information and there is no way to put it right. It certainly shouldn't be the default policy for relatively standard situations such as a cancelled station call.

The issues with the quality and volumes are actually an issue with TrainFX as a whole, Northern’s legacy fleet is made up of units inherited from many different operators, each with slightly varied TrainFX setups which means that some of them work very differently hence the very mixed up and jumbled mess they currently are, also a lot of the speakers are of varying ages. The recordings you hear on 195/331 are the exact ones used on the legacy fleet and these issues are being addressed and slowly fixed across the network.