Great Western Coffee Shop

I'm not sure I've heard about this happening berfore...

I'm on 1G47 - the 15:36 service from PAD to CNM. It was late to the platform but all avaiable evidence was that it was going to be P1. An IET pulled in and cleaning and catering crews busied themselves. I ambled slowly towards the front. The destination indicators on coaches K and L were still showing 'London PAD' from the inbound service. When I got to J, they changed to '15:36 Cheltenham'. Excellent; I had beaten the system! I got to D and the indicator said 'Penzance'. B*gger - I hadn't beaten the system: they were obviously about to announce 1G47 as departing from some other patform. I walked back up the platform and the indicator on the next coach said 'Cheltenham'. Back to D - 'Penzance'. Forward to C - 'Cheltenham'. At that point the platform announcements fired up and confirmed it as the 15:36 to Cheltenham.

Anyone else seen that happen? Or does coach D surreptitiously peel off at Reading and freewheel down the B&H to the Land of the Pasty?  ;D

It's not unknown for a rogue external and internal display to show a previous train and destination to what the rest show.

Carriage lettering can also sometimes be wrong, which can be a problem when trying to find seat reservations and your carriage appears to be missing.

S*******

It was definitely a single rogue display: it was still showing Penzance when I got off and I also noticed that the one at the other end of the same carriage was showing correctly.

This raises a question I was going to ask. Are visual and audible information on trains from the same source, which my simple mind thinks they would be.

A few weeks ago I was on a GWR service where visual was "saying" one thing but audible was saying something else. Was corrected very quickly.

On Saturday I was on a Thameslink service from Gatwick to Brighton, which as I sat down I noticed displayed this station is Kings Lynn, but audibly it said this is Gatwick. Visual stayed stuck at Kings Lynn all the way to Brighton, but the audible knew where it was.

I thionk the verbal announcements are connected to GPS, hence the train 'knowing' where it is/approaching and thus states corectly the station calls.The visuals used to be set by the driver using a Train ID system that they enter before leaving the originating station - each ID having the calling stations loaded, sop the display can show the calling stations etc

Both audio and visual are controlled by the same system on (all?) trains GWR use.  The problem you sometimes get is that a display doesn't receive the signal from the master computer leading to the odd rogue display here and there on occasions.  Sometimes the GPS link fails as well which can lead to the wrong station being announced - it should still work as it recognises the doors have been opened, but occasionally that gets misses - though that largely seems to only affect older train retrofitted.

800 023 had an unusual fault yesterday.  Displays were correct but the bit which puts the announcements together was clearly awry.  A different voice reeled off a string of numbers when each announcement was due.  It seems "Station 1000" may be London Paddington.

Sounds like some sort of debug mode perhaps.  ???

Come across all sorts of code for Paddington, but no "1000". (Added some other examples of these codes). 

.	CRS	NLC	TIPLOC	STANME	STANOX
Paddington	PAD	308700	PADTON	PADDINGTN	73000
Melksham	MKM	334600	MELKSHM	MELKSHAM	75361
Melksham Market Place Bus Stop	XBO	334601	MELKMAR	.	.

NLC codes often abbreviate to first 4 digits - so Paddington is 3087

See http://www.railwaycodes.org.uk/crs/CRSp.shtm

Software integration being the day job, it’s interesting they appear to not have chosen to use the plethora of existing codes for the new on board systems.  :-[

...unless it's a set of voice samples preloaded so the functionality can be tested through to audio at the factory, with no route or station data loaded?