"Jack Taylor" wrote:
The standard of railway-related writing has, for some while, been plummeting
steadily lower and we often lambast the BBC for their reporting but today's
efforts in the London "Evening Standard" by their Transport Correspondent,
Dick Murray, are spectacularly dismal.

Whilst appreciating that there's a need not to baffle the general public
with too much technobabble, there really is no excuse for the following load
of tosh, from his article about Tuesday night's shambles on the Jubilee
line:

"Instead of using traffic lights trains are linked by radio waves which
'talk' to trackside responders. These in turn send a signal to a computer in
the train engine to speed up or stop."

"One cut was to remove the reverse facility for trains. This means they
cannot circumvent any stranded carriages as they cannot be switched at
points to travel on the opposite track."

"Last night's problem appears to be more straightforward, with a piece of
signal box falling off a carriage and on to the track, short-circuiting the
power."

Traffic lights, train engines (on the Underground!), pieces of signal *box*
falling off? What has the man been on?


I share your concern about the plummeting standards of journalism.
However, there have always been problems when non-technical
journalists - whose education and training has mostly excluded any
mention of technology - write about technical matters.

The Evening Standard article you quoted is certainly no worse than
many other articles about technology by non-technical journalists.

However, some of the worst standards of "journalism" are to be found
on this newsgroup when contributors post messages about technology
(other than rail) that they know less than nothing about.