Everything I learned from this two hour MP3 of all Scotrail’s automated station announcements
Just how ungovernable *are* those cows?
The tradition of complaining that Christmas starts too early these days must surely be nearly as old as Christmas itself. To that, these days, we might add that it seems nuts that Black Friday, a thing that didn’t exist at all until about 20 minutes ago, now goes on for a week. (How can, as more than one email I received this morning told me, Black Friday be “almost over” when it’s already Monday?). Can’t wait for 2 January, when I finally get to eat my first hot cross bun of the season, then begin planning for harvest festival 2025.
But! Facts don’t care about your feelings, and advent has begun, so don’t let the terrifying unseasonal sunshine delude you: however you feel about the matter, we are now in the countdown to Christmas. I’m going to put out one of these free posts every week until we get there, and while I did consider trying to convince everyone this was a sort of online equivalent of advent candles, the truth is it’s a sales pitch, and the above rant about Black Friday makes me the worst kind of hypocrite. Sorry.
Anyway, the deal:
Subscribe for a year, and you won’t just get the usual delightful newsletter from me every Wednesday afternoon: I’ll also give you 10% off AND send you a copy of my book, The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything, too, to read or re-gift to the person of your choice!
That is an incredible £55 worth of stuff for just £36. I’m basically nerd Santa. To claim it – and why wouldn’t you? – just click here.
Anyway, that’s enough selling. And now, our feature presentation:
Everything I learned from this two hour MP3 of all Scotrail’s automated station announcements
Just occasionally, something good happens on the internet. One Friday in August, Jon Brady, a reporter at Scotland’s Daily Record newspaper, tweeted that he’d unearthed a two hour MP3 containing all ScotRail’s automated station announcements. A coder named Matt Eason split them into 2,440 individual MP3s and invited the internet to help transcribe them in a shared document. It took less than two hours. (You can find the original MP3 here and the resulting spreadsheet here.)
Some of these pre-recorded messages are full sentences; most, though, are fragments, of the sort that can be reassembled into such things (“We are sorry to announce that / this train / will be diverted to / Aberdeen” and so forth). And the list offers some interesting insights into the sort of things a train operating company covering the whole of Scotland might feel the need to tell people about. For example:
Predictably, weather is a problem.
The selection of weather-related reasons for train problems common enough to be pre-recorded as announcements include “fog”, “thick fog”, “heavy rain”, “high track temperatures”, “high winds”, “snow and ice”, and the helpful catch all “severe weather”. Then there are the more specific and more worrying options: “forecasted slippery rails”; “heavy rain flooding the railway”; “ice preventing trains getting electricity from the third rail”; “lightning damaging a train/station/the electricity supply/the signalling system”. Scotland, as will not surprise anyone who’s been there, has a lot of weather.
Unpredictably, so are a lot of other things.
“Bad weather conditions” is one of the things in the section of the spreadsheet categorised simply as “reasons” . So, as it happens, are a lot of other things. “Staff shortages”. “Vandalism”. “Mechanical problems”. “A points failure.”
So far, so predictable. But then, there’s “A boat colliding with a bridge”; “A chemical spillage near the railway”; “A wartime bomb near the railway”; “Cattle on the railway”; “Overcrowding because of a rugby match” – every one of these, remember, happens frequently enough to have made it worth getting the woman who does the announcements to pre-record them. Exactly how ungovernable are Scotland’s cows?
Then there are the ones that are just unnerving. “A coach becoming uncoupled on a train”. What? Do I need to worry about that now? “A shortage of trains because of accident damage”. How many trains were involved in this accident? What kind of accident are we talking about here? “The sea flooding the railway”. What the actual-
And then there’s “A rail buckling in the heat”. This does not sound like the sort of thing you’re often going to need to worry about in Scotland, but hey, give it ten years.
Announcers need to think about pitch.
There’s an automated announcement on London’s bus network that’s always annoyed the hell out of me. The announcement for the “Percy Street” stop pronounces Percy Street with the stress on the second word; this makes it sound like a person, rather than a side street off Tottenham Court Road.
To get around this sort of problem, the ScotRail announcements include various phrases – “engineering work”, the names of rival train operating companies – twice: once with an upward inflection (which sounds right in the middle of a sentence) and once with a downward one (which sounds right at the end). Numbers prefixed with a zero (“oh-one” and so forth) have a third, flat intonation, too.
In the same way, as well as bits running “is delayed by approximately five minutes” and so forth, there’s one that simply says “is delayed”, with a downward inflection strongly communicating “look, we don’t know either, that’s all we can tell you”.
Some thoughts on times, trains and platforms.
Edinburgh Waverley station. Image: Network Rail.
The assorted clips allowing ScotRail to say how long you’re going to be waiting for your delayed train to Inverness (“...will be approximately three minutes” and so forth) climb up in increments of one minute until they hit five, then five minutes until they hit 55. This makes sense – relatively few trains run less than hourly, and if one’s more than an hour late you’re beyond recorded announcements, lads – except you can apparently also say “7 minutes” and “12 minutes” too? No other numbers, just those. Weird.
There are also announcements suggesting you stand well away from platforms 1 to 8. There are definitely stations in Scotland with through platforms with higher numbers than that (Edinburgh Waverley, Glasgow Central): I’m assuming they don’t get any express services, because the alternative is terrifying. (Additional modular announcements, incidentally, also allow you to refer to platforms A to D and zero.)
Trains, meanwhile, can be formed of any number of carriages between one and 12, but there’s also one that lets you fill in the number yourself (“This train is formed of-”). This will be very handy if a train arrives with 13 carriages, or 27, or three and a half.
Some of the destinations and train operating companies in there are really baffling.
A lot of the discussion of all this on nerd Twitter concerned some of the non-Scottish destinations which the pre-records included, especially Kidderminster. I was all ready to smugly laugh this off, on the grounds that all these places are on the paths of CrossCountry Trains which extend into Scotland, and so might occasionally come up as the source of delays...
...except, that there are some places that definitely aren’t that at all. I can’t work out why a rail announcement at a Scottish station would ever need to refer to, say, Stratford High Street station on London’s DLR. Or Southeastern Trains, which is in there with several different brandings and intonations, despite being at the very farthest end of the country where it can’t interfere with Scottish rail services in the slightest. Or Westernhanger Racecourse Station, which is also in Kent, and which closed sometime in the 1960s.
What’s more, while my clever theory explains why ScotRail has pre-recorded versions of “London Paddington” and “London Marylebone” (but not, say, “London Fenchurch Street”), it is utterly silent on the fact it also feels the need to reference the assorted heritage steam railways of southern England. Seriously, why on earth would passengers in Glasgow ever need to know about events on the Bluebell or Watercress railways?
Some of the announcements are just plain weird.
Okay, I can get my head around “please note that today this train is in reverse formation” – sometimes you might want to tell the six first class passengers that they’re at the wrong end of the platform. “Megatrain accommodation can be found at the rear of the train” momentarily floored me, but that turns out to be a scheme operated by Megabus to offer cheap tickets on under-used services.
But “Please ignore the following announcements”? Under what circumstances are you ever going to make announcements, having just told the general public to ignore them? What on earth is happening here?
In real emergencies, they change announcers anyway.
The vast, vast majority of these announcements are by the same well-spoken Scottish woman (I’m terrible at accents, but if pushed I’d guess she was from somewhere near Edinburgh). Four, though, are not her. It’s actually the same announcement, repeated at four different volumes: “Attention please! Please leave the station immediately.” That one is the voice of an Englishman.
He sounds familiar, so my guess is there’s some legal requirement to use the same announcement across the network. But it does accidentally suggest that when things get serious you need to get a bloke in, and preferably not a Scottish bloke, either.
The most popular bit might be about delays.
It’s “We are sorry to announce that the”. I’d write “Tsh! Says it all, doesn’t it?” or something at this point, except that the reason I said “might” in the previous heading is because I’m going off a comment in a column of the spreadsheet called “notes” and so can’t work out if this is a factual comment about this genuinely being the most widely used file, or just someone making a funny joke.
Not a single announcement uses the word “outwith”.
Poor show, ScotRail, we’re never going to get that useful Scottish word into non-Scottish usage at this rate.
Anyway, if you want to make your own Scotrail announcement – and why wouldn’t you? – you can do so via this helpful dashboard, made by Simon Willison and Tom Philbin.
The article above is an expanded extract from the archive of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything, a weekly newsletter which goes out every Wednesday at 4pm. Normally, become a paying supporter, for a mere £4 a month or £40 a year, means that, for less than a pound a week, you’ll get a frankly slightly excessive amount of content every Wednesday afternoon: a bit on politics, some diverting links, an article on something from history/geography/language/whatever I’ve been obsessing about this week, and the map of the week. Click here to get started.
But, as noted, right now you can get all that, and a copy of my first book The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything, for just £36. Just click here.
And, of course, times are tough. If you can’t currently justify paying for some nerd’s substack (unemployed, underemployed, impoverished student, and so forth), just hit reply and I’ll give you a complimentary subscription, no questions asked. Honestly, it sounds like a trick, not least since it seems to undermine that whole “special offer” thing I was only just banging on about… but it isn’t, I am literally giving it away. Just hit reply.
God bless us, every one.