On 20/04/2011 22:40, 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

I though it was the pictures we hated?

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."

Other than being electric multiple units (which normals wouldn't
understand) and so not having an "engine", isn't that more or less how
it works?

"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."

Have they? We might understand that UK trains don't generally run wrong
line, but in my experience normals don't. "Why can't we go round it"
must be quite a common question when things break, along with "why can't
another train push the broken one" and "why can't we just get off here,
it's not far".

"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?

Perhaps it is aimed at a general audience, and assumes that people who
know that "signal box" has a specific meaning in a railway context will
be reading Modern Railways in WHS rather than the Evening Standard
(perhaps on a train which isn't officially "overground"...)?

What has the man been on?

Did he actually write the above phrases? Maybe someone re-wrote it to
delete anoraky stuff.

Anyway, the other day the BBC website had a pic showing what looked like
an IE loco and Enterprise stock on a story about a NIR domestic service,
so once I find my green biro I'm writing to tell them that if I had a
licence, I'd cancel it...

--
Arthur Figgis Surrey, UK