Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Delays

588 words

I'm on my way to Bremen as it is my dad's birthday tomorrow. Usually trains going north are on time when passing Göttingen – but not so today. The train is one of those high speed trains that is split in two parts. This can be quite inconvenient for passengers: You can only walk through half of the train and, more importantly, a higher percentage of coaches is wasted for first class and the restaurant infrastructure as those are provided in both parts of the train. – Quite annoying when you have to battle for a seat at busy times.

The idea for having these trains is that they can be split at some stage, serving two destinations. This way you won't have a half-empty train for the last leg of the journey (but rather just half a train) and apparently you can use the tracks more efficiently as having two separate trains running on the shared part of the route would mean that each train will need its safety margins &c. So this isn't quite as dumb as it looks at first. Actually this will happen with my train in Hannover – one half going to Hamburg and the other one to Bremen and Oldenburg.

Apparently in this train they lost communication from the back of the train to the driver en route. And the train isn't allowed to run in that case so they had to wait until it's fixed. While having this information doesn't really help the fact that the train was running late in any way, getting it is soothing in some way, suggesting that they actually care to keep me informed and know what's going on.

But all this isn't what I wanted to write about. My topic is delays. This is a delay and I immediately saw it when entering the station: My perfect timing made me arrive there about five minutes before the train's departure, and the display at the station (bum, what's the proper English word for those large mechanical displays you find in railway stations and airports?) indicated a delay of about 30 minutes. And that's what I don't like: It's very imprecise. Not only should they have more accurate numbers themselves, but the numbers they give aren't reliable.

Murphy's law working on an about 30 minutes statement means that having a coffee and returning 25 minutes later is a safe way to miss your train. Similarly waiting in place instead will take 40 minutes. And in both cases it's supposedly your own fault.

But things are a bit more creative even: They actually change those times. When I arrived, the board said about 30 minutes and an announcement was made indicating 30 to 40 minutes, causing me to phone my parents and give them a heads-up on the delay. Now, once I was on the platform, the display actually read about 20 minutes, and slightly over 20 minutes was the actual delay.

People have missed trains because these delay announcements being too high (I have actually heard a story of the same happening for planes). This is a bad thing. And luckily it wasn't a problem for me today.

The conductor seemed pretty worn out, by the way. Many people seemed to have inquired for the reasons for the delay, whether they'll reach their connecting trains, what their other options will be &c. On the way to the toilet I overheard some old people being quite bitchy towards her. Not a good day on the job...

October 14, 2003, 21:06

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