As someone with autism I recall when travelling by train as a kid during the 2000s that many of the announcements at Great Western Railway stations were a borderline intolerable volume for me.
These days I tend to listen to music, but otherwise the announcements are generally an acceptable volume for me, and it makes me wonder if they have become quieter?
The videos I have seen of train station announcements suggest that the announcement system at the stations on the Great Western Railway was changed to what it currently is sometime in around 2011 or 2012 (I recall it being like now in 2014).
The announcement chime at Swindon has definitely changed - from sometime in the early 2000s up to the start of the 2010s it was this rather piercing 3 or 4 note bell chime, whereas it's now a more generic "bing bong" noise (which it looks to have also been in the 1990s based on video footage).
I suspect stations have far more speakers than they used to have which means they can have, say, 20 speakers playing a quieter announcement instead of three or four speakers outputting them at maximum volume.
I recall it used to be the case that you could often hear them a reasonable distance outside of the stations I'm familiar with, whereas this no longer seems the case.
The announcements onboard trains felt much the same volume to me in the 2000s to what they do now.
These days I tend to listen to music, but otherwise the announcements are generally an acceptable volume for me, and it makes me wonder if they have become quieter?
The videos I have seen of train station announcements suggest that the announcement system at the stations on the Great Western Railway was changed to what it currently is sometime in around 2011 or 2012 (I recall it being like now in 2014).
The announcement chime at Swindon has definitely changed - from sometime in the early 2000s up to the start of the 2010s it was this rather piercing 3 or 4 note bell chime, whereas it's now a more generic "bing bong" noise (which it looks to have also been in the 1990s based on video footage).
I suspect stations have far more speakers than they used to have which means they can have, say, 20 speakers playing a quieter announcement instead of three or four speakers outputting them at maximum volume.
I recall it used to be the case that you could often hear them a reasonable distance outside of the stations I'm familiar with, whereas this no longer seems the case.
The announcements onboard trains felt much the same volume to me in the 2000s to what they do now.
