Plot To Replace Printed Timetables With QR Codes

[CaptainHaddock]

Just as well PIS screens never malfunction and crash and mobile phones never run out of battery and you can always access the internet wherever you are.

No, this is a foolish idea and any cost saving would be marginal. Keep printed timetable posters; they're far more easy to read than squinting at a tiny mobile phone screen and having to scroll through about 20 pages to find the train time you want!

 

[Ianno87]

Just as well PIS screens never malfunction and crash and mobile phones never run out of battery and you can always access the internet wherever you are.

No, this is a foolish idea and any cost saving would be marginal. Keep printed timetable posters; they're far more easy to read than squinting at a tiny mobile phone screen and having to scroll through about 20 pages to find the train time you want!

Of course, printed information is never, ever incorrect, out of date, or illegible is it? Nothing is perfect.

Why would you be scrolling through 20 pages on a phone? That's what journey planners are for (if you, say, want to know when the last train home is, whack it into National Rail Enquiries - absolutely nobody would be faffing around with a PDF on a screen)

 

[bluenoxid]

Details of all departures on printed posters just need to be functional not fancy. Setting them up on multiple sheets of A4 or A3 paper ought not to be difficult or costly.

I can understand this. It would be interesting to compare the costs of producing locally on an A4 printer at say train crew depots and staffed stations versus central production and distribution.

Another potential cost saving would be to review the size of poster boards and potentially shifting to a bus timetable style unit for local/regional lines where you only display departures from that station rather than the line timetable.

 

[Ianno87]

I can understand this. It would be interesting to compare the costs of producing locally on an A4 printer at say train crew depots and staffed stations versus central production and distribution.

What Stagecoach buses seem to do (e.g. for service change posters) is have National Head Office produce a template document (e.g. with a 'Chistmas' background), but then the local staff type in the local information and print out/ put it up.

Spotted one the other day with an obvious typo left over from some template text, which may me think (Changes to the 13 services).

 

[takno]

They're awful things, as the backlights are very weak. Barely legible in the evenings, especially as they're high up. They're fitting them in Leeds and they're so bad compared to the old LED displays.

The capacity counter doesn't work either - always shows as low passenger numbers. First West Yorkshire for some reason still insist on social distance capacities, so they only allow 70ish on a double decker.

Epaper doesn't have backlights. What you are describing sounds like LCD displays, which generally are awful as big overhead displays.

I think the suggestion here (and indeed it was one of the suggested benefits of epaper 20 years ago), is the ability to make large posters which can update themselves. This would allow you to push out updates every, say, week or so.

I think the reasons they haven't caught on for the purpose is that they are still really expensive, and the bigger the display the more expensive they are. They are also still fairly fragile, and it would be trivial for a vandal or frustrated passenger to cause thousands of pounds of damage. You'd never make the costs stack up against paper

 

[CaptainHaddock]

Of course, printed information is never, ever incorrect, out of date, or illegible is it? Nothing is perfect.

Why would you be scrolling through 20 pages on a phone? That's what journey planners are for (if you, say, want to know when the last train home is, whack it into National Rail Enquiries - absolutely nobody would be faffing around with a PDF on a screen)

Go to any TOC website to download a timetable and it will invariably be a pdf file.

Journey planners don't work offline - you try getting an internet signal when you're stood on the platform at Garsdale on a wet and windy night!

 

[janb]

Observations from the coalface,

a) A-Z Departure posters. A personal favourite of mine design wise and I have used when out and about. I can accept that not everybody is as enamoured but I would be sad to see them go. Remain important for certain stations lacking mobile coverage at the very least.

b) Line timetable posters. Personally not bothered, I think they could be replaced with more of a marketing poster showing where the train goes (as certain Community Rail Lines do) and a link/code for where timetables can be found.

c) Printed timetable booklets. Mileage may vary depending on area of the country, demographics, service frequency etc. All I can say is that working in an area with a sizeable elderly population, and a sizeable tourist/leisure market, they remain in high demand. The booklet produced this summer by Northern for the Cumbria/S+C/Bentham lines (very similar to the Stagecoach Lakes Connection booklet) shows a potential model at least for summer season of combining timetables with marketing (rover information etc) and adding value to the business that way.

 

[takno]

Go to any TOC website to download a timetable and it will invariably be a pdf file.

Journey planners don't work offline - you try getting an internet signal when you're stood on the platform at Garsdale on a wet and windy night!

Interestingly the entire UK timetable including freight and empties can be fitted into rather less than 50mb, updated daily with a a download of less than 1mb, and stored on the phone in a format that can be searched in well under a second. All of which can be done from a webpage without installing an app.

And yet National Rail enquiries still requires a stable internet connection in order to pick a station name from a drop-down. Go figure.

 

[Andyh82]

Details of all departures on printed posters just need to be functional not fancy. Setting them up on multiple sheets of A4 or A3 paper ought not to be difficult or costly.

I don’t think the rail industry are so short of money that they can’t afford to print a proper poster and can only run to printing stuff off on A4 from the office printer

Personally I’d drop the A to Z lists, I often find them a bit over the top at fairly straight forward stations, where you just get the same departures over and over again, but I’d keep posters showing the timetable on each line. Metro produced some fairly decent ones at the very end of the period they were responsible for such matters.

 

[WesternLancer]

I don’t think the rail industry are so short of money that they can’t afford to print a proper poster and can only run to printing stuff off on A4 from the office printer

Personally I’d drop the A to Z lists, I often find them a bit over the top at fairly straight forward stations, where you just get the same departures over and over again, but I’d keep posters showing the timetable on each line. Metro produced some fairly decent ones at the very end of the period they were responsible for such matters.

On this forum do we perhaps forget that some people will have not concept as to what line or route the place they want to go is on, so need the A-Z facility. eg 'I want to go to Peterborough - how would I know that trains that go to Newcastle stop there'? And at busy stations that serve lots of lines this is going to be even more the case.

 

[357]

IMO get rid of them. I worked stations for seven years and never saw anyone use them successfully without then double checking with a member of staff.

Most enquiries regarding them were along the lines of "your poster says this, but my phone says this".

Journey planner on a ticket machine, and help points with useful staff would cover the small number of people who don't have a more convenient way to check the schedule.

 

[takno]

IMO get rid of them. I worked stations for seven years and never saw anyone use them successfully without then double checking with a member of staff.

Most enquiries regarding them were along the lines of "your poster says this, but my phone says this".

Journey planner on a ticket machine, and help points with useful staff would cover the small number of people who don't have a more convenient way to check the schedule.

So you're saying that they aren't especially useful at well-staffed stations, which makes sense. I'm not so sure that it's worth spending probably a great deal more than 2 million on real well-trained staff to man help points, just so we wouldn't need to spend whatever portion of the quoted 2 million is spent on posters at unstaffed stations.

 

[357]

So you're saying that they aren't especially useful at well-staffed stations, which makes sense. I'm not so sure that it's worth spending probably a great deal more than 2 million on real well-trained staff to man help points, just so we wouldn't need to spend whatever portion of the quoted 2 million is spent on posters at unstaffed stations.

How busy do you think the people who answer the help point calls (amongst calls about other things) are ?

That 2 million could provide 80 staff earning 25k per year - I'd suggest that the level of additional calls wouldn't need anything like 80 additional staff

TfL even trialed a system some years ago where help points were answered by staff at the nearest hub station instead of a call center.

 

[AlterEgo]

How busy do you think the people who answer the help point calls (amongst calls about other things) are ?

That 2 million could provide 80 staff earning 25k per year - I'd suggest that the level of additional calls wouldn't need anything like 80 additional staff

It would provide about 40 or 50 staff and that is assuming you don’t have to expand or fundamentally change workplaces to accommodate them. The cost of employing people isn’t limited to their wages.

 

[takno]

How busy do you think the people who answer the help point calls (amongst calls about other things) are ?

That 2 million could provide 80 staff earning 25k per year - I'd suggest that the level of additional calls wouldn't need anything like 80 additional staff

TfL even trialed a system some years ago where help points were answered by staff at the nearest hub station instead of a call center.

Again, that potentially rather small portion of the 2m, even less once you've installed help points at stations that don't have them and kept them in good repair.

25k per year isn't fantastic given that we want them to be at least vaguely knowledgeable and trained. Including a fairly sparse 25% additional costs for NI, pension, equipment and licenses means you only get 64 staff. Assuming 46 40 hour weeks a year, which is pretty much minimum holiday, and that they need to cover 16 hours of opening, I'm landing up with cover of 20 staff for that 2 million quid. Inevitably at least 5-10% of that would disappear in management, being managed and other non-contact work, so you have perhaps 19 people covering 2000 stations.

If they're going to cover 100 stations each then they aren't going to have a lot of time left over to mop out the toilets.

 

[357]

Again, that potentially rather small portion of the 2m, even less once you've installed help points at stations that don't have them and kept them in good repair.

25k per year isn't fantastic given that we want them to be at least vaguely knowledgeable and trained. Including a fairly sparse 25% additional costs for NI, pension, equipment and licenses means you only get 64 staff. Assuming 46 40 hour weeks a year, which is pretty much minimum holiday, and that they need to cover 16 hours of opening, I'm landing up with cover of 20 staff for that 2 million quid. Inevitably at least 5-10% of that would disappear in management, being managed and other non-contact work, so you have perhaps 19 people covering 2000 stations.

If they're going to cover 100 stations each then they aren't going to have a lot of time left over to mop out the toilets.

MTR Crossrail pay safety critical dispatchers the same. In London.

There are 1,200 unstaffed train stations in the UK, all of them with less than 0.25m journeys per year.

Most people likely know the timetable, have a phone to check, look at departure screens, etc.

I feel there are multiple people in this thread under the impression there is a constant queue of 10 or more people waiting to look at each poster!

 

[Techniquest]

I'm going to weigh in on this interesting topic. I've now read all 4 pages so far, and it's a variety of opinions here.

Almost everything I do involving being online to some extent, or at the least having a device in my hand/otherwise nearby. Which is normal in the modern day, although I happily keep my data signal, GPS and other things switched off when not in use. How people have them on all day long I have no idea, I'd never get any peace and quiet! I am finding a preference for doing more things offline and by pen and paper whenever possible.

That's not to do with desiring peace and quiet, although it is a bonus. Seriously, nothing is quite as infuriating as a phone ringing or making endless amounts of beeps when you're in the middle of a bike ride or other exercise session when having the phone in hand is not possible. The majority of people do not seem to grasp the concept of not being permanently attached to a device, thankfully most people that know me have adapted to waiting for a response!

No, my desire to do more by pen and paper is from some farce with my Google account. Somehow, a few months back, it wiped out an absolute ton of my files on Keep notes and Docs while setting up a Gmail account. Don't ask me how that happened, I genuinely don't know. Ever since then, I've started swapping over more and more things to pen and paper, which is extremely handy and doesn't have an annoying tendency to fail or go wrong in general unlike a digital copy! Don't get me wrong, I use Docs for some things still, but I'd be lost without my paper backups.

So all that considered, I do still use paper timetables myself sometimes. Not always, obviously, as I do use RTT a lot. I want to use it for a possible journey plan later today, for example, thanks to the TfW allocations thing. The option to look at a paper timetable, especially in an area of poor mobile signal coverage, to plan my journey back is really handy especially on impulsive journeys.

I would miss the paper timetables, be they in poster or booklet format. I don't like QR codes, they're great for e-tickets but for general everyday use I'm not interested. Part of that bias is down to idiotic placement of them next to barcodes on products, which makes my job much more irritating.

I can see why the railway would want to cut out the cost of putting the posters up, but I would class a timetable poster as an essential item. As essential as having a price label in a supermarket! Permanently ceasing the printing of paper timetables for all the different routes, as someone who is very pro-recycling and very pro-environment, yes I would say it is time to cease those. It must cost a fortune to print those every year, and if they go I'd certainly like to get a final copy of the ones for my local routes as a memento of times gone by. 10 years ago, when I was doing an ALR, paper timetable booklets were incredibly handy but now they're not such an essential item. I still like them, but I could live without those.

 

[DarloRich]

In which case you'd still be 21 years behind.

the point being QR is hardly new technology! It does kind of ruin the point if you have to explain it..........

 

[londonteacher]

As I have said previously, how often are the timetable posters accurate? Most weekends are most likely not due to engineering work, as soon as there is a delay they are not, as soon as a cancellation for whatever reason they are not. It's hard to justify their use if they are frequently inaccurate.

It would be good to reach some middle ground and help points are the obvious solution (and most likely cheaper than hiring station staff).

 

[Andyh82]

As I have said previously, how often are the timetable posters accurate? Most weekends are most likely not due to engineering work, as soon as there is a delay they are not, as soon as a cancellation for whatever reason they are not. It's hard to justify their use if they are frequently inaccurate.

It would be good to reach some middle ground and help points are the obvious solution (and most likely cheaper than hiring station staff).

I don’t know what station you use where it is effected by engineering work “most weekends”

Of course there should be posters displaying information about engineering work as well. Considering the number who turn up completely unawares and have a very poor journey experience at best, or kick off and cause a fuss at worse, every channel of communication should be used for engineering works changes

 

[londonteacher]

I don’t know what station you use where it is affected by engineering work “most weekends”

My nearest is Plumstead. It is rare for a full weekend service to be running. Either the core or stations from Dartford cause changes or service cancellations for Thameslink, for SE if one of the lines from London to Dartford are closed this causes service changes. If Charing Cross or Cannon Street is closed this changes.

So, posters at some stations would be always wrong. Plumstead does not have any posters anyway.

Travelled around the southern network yesterday. Couldn't see a single timetable poster at the stations I visited. Either the small ones or the large ststions. Maybe this is already happening?