Life In Reverse

The world is broken; it may be the fall out from the Credit Crunch, or it may be just the fact that I am basing my observations on the behaviour of the Northern Line.

I rolled up at the station this morning as usual, to find that a train was scheduled to arrive in one minute, destination Kennington via Charing Cross. Not my favoured train, especially as there are reported severe delays on the District and Circle Lines, which are my connections on that branch, but it would do.

The train arrives as advertised, but the internal destination indicator is suggesting that we are in fact going to High Barnet, where it has just come from. This continues as we pull into Woodside Park, at which point the driver announces over the tannoy that the train is actually headed for Morden via Bank (hurrah!) and he will alert the station controllers accordingly. The internal indicators still happily announce High Barnet.

The stroke of genius was that as we arrived in West Finchley, the indicator changed and started announcing that our next station would be that we had just left. People getting on the train at this point were clearly taking pot luck; the platform indicators saying one thing, the train indicators describing the journey in reverse and the true destination of the train something of a mystery. Such is digital technology in North London.

There was a squawk from the tannoy at Finchley Central and the indicators all went pleasantly blank. Sadly they re-set and suddenly everything was in agreement. It was far less exciting, but at least we knew where we were headed.

Life In Reverse

The world is broken; it may be the fall out from the Credit Crunch, or it may be just the fact that I am basing my observations on the behaviour of the Northern Line.

I rolled up at the station this morning as usual, to find that a train was scheduled to arrive in one minute, destination Kennington via Charing Cross. Not my favoured train, especially as there are reported severe delays on the District and Circle Lines, which are my connections on that branch, but it would do.

The train arrives as advertised, but the internal destination indicator is suggesting that we are in fact going to High Barnet, where it has just come from. This continues as we pull into Woodside Park, at which point the driver announces over the tannoy that the train is actually headed for Morden via Bank (hurrah!) and he will alert the station controllers accordingly. The internal indicators still happily announce High Barnet.

The stroke of genius was that as we arrived in West Finchley, the indicator changed and started announcing that our next station would be that we had just left. People getting on the train at this point were clearly taking pot luck; the platform indicators saying one thing, the train indicators describing the journey in reverse and the true destination of the train something of a mystery. Such is digital technology in North London.

There was a squawk from the tannoy at Finchley Central and the indicators all went pleasantly blank. Sadly they re-set and suddenly everything was in agreement. It was far less exciting, but at least we knew where we were headed.