Departure screens .....

[PR1Berske]

......Should not be in lowercase lettering That means you, Preston station.

When/why did this happen?

 

[Cherry_Picker]

You probably need to expand your point a bit more if you want to provoke a debate. Are you asking why the text on departure screens is in lower case? Do you feel that it should be in ALL CAPS? If so, why?

I can't cite any specific research but a few years ago there was a segment on Top Gear of all places where they went into a bit of depth about the redesign of road signs in the UK in the 1950s and 60s.

Margaret Calvert was a guest on the show, she was one of the two people in charge of the redesign (Jock Kinneir was the other but he died in 1994) and she explained that the redesign team fought tooth and nail to have most text on road signs to be in lower case because they firmly believed that lower case text is much more legible to humans at a glance because the overwhelming majority of text we read throughout the day is in a lower case font.

Calvert and Kinneir were given the task of redoing British Rail signs after they had finished with the road project. They created the now famous Rail Alphabet font and no doubt they had a large influence on the removal of signage which displayed information in ALL CAPS.

So maybe that is why the departure screens at Preston are in lower case. Maybe whoever gets to decide such things agrees with a very successful design philosophy and that signage displaying lower case text is more useful to the people it is there to serve.

So why should departure screens not be in lower case writing?

 

[driver9000]

As I recall the old TV style monitors were in lower case as were the Solari flapper boards. I think it looks much neater and easier to read.

 

[transmanche]

Margaret Calvert was a guest on the show, she was one of the two people in charge of the redesign (Jock Kinneir was the other but he died in 1994) and she explained that the redesign team fought tooth and nail to have most text on road signs to be in lower case because they firmly believed that lower case text is much more legible to humans at a glance because the overwhelming majority of text we read throughout the day is in a lower case font.

Spot on!

Firstly, we humans will read mixed case much faster than we read something in all-caps, because we recognise the shape of the words much faster.

Secondly (and perhaps more relevant) it's one of the things mandated by the accessibility regulations, on the grounds of readability. (I don't know if such regulations apply to signage at stations as well as on board trains, but I presume it does - and if it doesn't, it makes sense to be consistent.)

 

[jon0844]

I presume it wasn't meaning text should be all in capitals, but rather than many messages are in lower case without any capitals?

I've seen that were there have been messages entered manually, and the operator seems unable to use the shift key (maybe broken?!), along with poor punctuation that can even change the meaning of messages - or at best make them a bit confusing and require some thought to work out.

To have everything in capitals would be silly, besides things you really wanted to emphasise - such as warnings.

I do think that one backward step for FCC by going to the Atos system was the inability to put up flashing words. When telling people to stand away from the platform edge as a fast train comes through, it worked better to have something flashing that might catch the eye than a static message in lower case.

 

[Eagle]

As I recall the old TV style monitors were in lower case as were the Solari flapper boards.

The ones at Waterloo were all caps. Also they had the annoying habit of sometimes listing two stations on the same line without a comma in between, making it look like there were stations called things like Vauxhall Queenstown Road or Earlsfield Wimbledon.

Here's a video from the last days of NSE (complete with Lyndhurst Road and Southampton Parkway; that takes me back!)

 

[nickswift99]

There was some research done on this in the 80s specifically in a railway context. I found it while researching my degree dissertation.

From memory, the key thing is that mixed case allows those with sight difficulties to more easily distinguish letters and hence read words. You'd think that wouldn't be so important for car drivers (as they should already achieve a certain level of eyesight) but it turns out that it helps even those with 20/20 vision.

 

[Eagle]

It helps because lowercase letters are all different heights and shapes, with the ascenders and descenders giving each word a distinct shape and meaning you can read it before the individual strokes of the letters become visible. Whereas in all caps all the letters are the same height and blocky, making all words basically rectangular so you can't read them on shape alone.