On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 08:14:59PM -0700, NM wrote:

And train arrivals are predictable? they can be 10 minutes late before
it even counts as officially late, built in cushion to mask their poor
performance. You remind me of the old Reggie Perrin (Leonard Rossiter
RIP) with the daily standing joke about his late arrival down to the
railways, I don't think he arrived on time even once, comedy, yes but
based on reality.

You can generally reckon that a train will arrive within a few minutes
of its scheduled time, and that a car will also arrive within a few
minutes of its expected time. For longer journeys, however, the train
will still normally get there within a few minutes of its scheduled
time, but the car will have a much larger margin of error.

The old saw about trains always being late is quite simply a lie. My
father used to do Timetabling Stuff for the old Southern Region, and was
once called as a witness in a court case between someone who blamed his
constant late arrival at work on the trains and his ex-employer, who had
fired him. My old man had the evidence to prove that the chap who'd
been fired was a lieing sack of **** and that the trains did, in fact,
run on time in the vast majority of cases.

--
David Cantrell | Reality Engineer, Ministry of Information

Guns aren't the problem. People who deserve to die are the problem.