Forums
This week's special edition is a series of Error'ds specifically dealing with trains, which geeks are for some reason especially taken with. It should go without saying that the reason these are predominantly from Europe is not an indication their infosystems are especially bad, but rather as we all know, US passenger trains are so little used that there is far less opportunity to discover any wtfs.
This entry by Robert G. requires explanation. London North East Rail has a novel (six years old now but still new to me) point-of-use display of seat reservations. In my train experience, a reserved seat ticket only identifies a certain car but not a specific seat, so this is pretty slick. On LNER, if you don't have a seat reservation but you're traveling in the specified class, you can take any seat labelled "Available" but you'll need to vacate it at the "until XXX" station. The two rows in Robert's fuzzy image read "Current" and "Next", which should help to understand what has happened here. The two red lights indicate "Reservations". As Robert puts it, "My train was part cancelled, and a replacement coach was provided to where it was now starting from. Unfortunatly the coach arrived a few minutes after the train departed, so a new train was needed. Fortunatly the TOC's (Train Operating Company) app allows seat reservations to made up to 10 minutes from departure and the next train was in half an hour - given it's a long journey I was going to get a reservation. Apparently several other people had the same idea, resulting in two of us getting a confirmation (both email and in app) for the same seat." Apparently Robert reserved Edinburgh->KingsX and a random competitor reserved Newcastle->KingsX at the same time. It seems that LNER's seat reservation application had a failure of transactional integrity. Hopefully it was eventually consistent.
Jaroen van Oo. wrote "I spotted this weird timewarp in the tram this morning from Utrecht to IJsselstein, the Netherlands. Not sure what happened as all the other arrival times were correct and as far as I know Hooghe Waerd lies in the same timezone as the rest of the route." The Dutch text in the black bar means "Next Stop" and "Arrival" in English. My own understanding of Dutch is poor, and so "naar" seems like one of those all-purpose prepositions that can translate to almost anything. In this case, I assume it signifies "the place where this tram is now". So either there was a timewarp or a spacewarp suddenly shunted the train to Punta Delgada and back.
FNO Andrew minimized a 46-minute delay, griping "South West Railway. On time 40 minutes late."
Michael R. , who we've seen a lot of in these parts, drew our attention to a breaking alert just 21 seconds old. "ABCDEFG1 at 21:06:57 which is before 21:07:18 in Canning Town/London"
"Have you tried turning it off and on again?", asked Sandra von I. "The railways of the Netherlands are great. Fast, clean trains connecting all the cities and towns of the country. But it turns out that the status displays on board need a little help waking up..."
