Great Western Coffee Shop

OK, I know this seems strange but travelling back on the stretch from Didcot to Reading quite a lot of it is cabled and therefore obviously there are a lot of gantries along the way.

This got me thinking - but seriously for once. Is there any risk that the even appearance of these gantries within the drivers field of view could have some negative side effect such as hypnosis?

I know we are by no means the first to be electrified so if there was a problem I'm guessing other areas would have dealt with this before us.

I think with decades of driving on overhead electric railways, any negative effects on drivers would have been discovered and studied by now.

When you drive along a road there are often periodically repeating features in your view - lampposts, dashed white lines, and even vehicles coming the other way. Street lamps at night are even more prominent. But you don't look in a fixed direction, so they don't repeat for long before you shift your view, and that would be true for a train driver too.

You may be thinking about the effect of sunlight through the evenly-spaced trees along a (typically French) road. That effect doesn't depend on your direction of view, so is more plausible. But I don't think OLE blocks enough light to do that. Also, while that effect is quite widely believed in, scientific study might or might not support it.

And is it really hypnosis? Making you tired, or sleepy, is more like it.

I may have imagined this, but I thought I heard somewhere that the reason very high speed trains like the Eurostar/TGV have small central cab windows is to minimise the peripheral view of the trackside rushing by which at high speeds could cause some drivers to feel queasy.

Equally it could just be that it is easier to meet the crash requirements with smaller windows.