Today I saw paddington style boards under the Solaris. Everyone was bunching close under them and it was chaos, so I hope they'll learn a lesson and keep the solaris boards which have yet to have a better replacement at long distance.
Reminds me of the fact that cinemas still use high quality film instead of low quality digital projection.
Apparently the boards currently at Liverpool St are only temporary until Christmas I think it is when they are also getting the Waterloo/Charing Cross/Victoria LED boards.
The reason there is now only one station in the entire country (Watford Junction) using the boards is because of 2 reasons:
1) spare parts are becoming scarce (although I don't understand this reason when the Solari Udine factory is still going strong in Italy).
2) the lack of flexibility especially in times of disruption.
I remember reading about a month ago a station in America which replaced the Solari indicators with an LED board only to get a lot of complaints from the passengers about not knowing when the boards had changed (as the sound gives it away on a Solari) - the answer they used was to record a Solari board noise and put a speaker next to the LED boards and play the noise whenever they changed...
).
