Error’d: That Movie with Whatsisname

This week’s special edition is a series of Error’ds specifically
dealing with trains, which geeks are for some reason especially
taken with. It should go without saying that the reason these are
predominantly from Europe is not an indication their infosystems
are especially bad, but rather as we all know, US passenger trains
are so little used that there is far less opportunity to discover any wtfs.

This entry by
Robert G.
requires explanation. London North East Rail has
a novel (six years old now but still new to me) point-of-use display
of seat reservations. In my train experience, a reserved seat ticket
only identifies a certain car but not a specific seat, so this is
pretty slick. On LNER, if you don’t have a seat reservation but you’re
traveling in the specified class, you can take any seat labelled
“Available” but you’ll need to vacate it at the “until XXX” station.
The two rows in Robert’s fuzzy image read “Current” and “Next”,
which should help to understand what has happened here. The two red
lights indicate “Reservations”. As Robert puts it,
“My train was part cancelled, and a replacement coach
was provided to where it was now starting from. Unfortunatly
the coach arrived a few minutes after the train departed,
so a new train was needed. Fortunatly the TOC’s (Train
Operating Company) app allows seat reservations to made
up to 10 minutes from departure and the next train was in
half an hour – given it’s a long journey I was going to
get a reservation. Apparently several other people had
the same idea, resulting in two of us getting a confirmation
(both email and in app) for the same seat.”
Apparently Robert reserved Edinburgh->KingsX and a random
competitor reserved Newcastle->KingsX at the same time.
It seems that LNER’s seat reservation application had a
failure of transactional integrity. Hopefully it was
eventually consistent.

 

Jaroen van Oo.
wrote
“I spotted this weird timewarp in the tram this morning
from Utrecht to IJsselstein, the Netherlands. Not sure
what happened as all the other arrival times were
correct and as far as I know Hooghe Waerd lies in the
same timezone as the rest of the route.” The Dutch text
in the black bar means “Next Stop” and “Arrival” in
English. My own understanding of Dutch is poor, and
so “naar”
seems like one of those all-purpose prepositions that
can translate to almost anything. In this case, I assume
it signifies “the place where this tram is now”. So either
there was a timewarp or a spacewarp suddenly shunted the
train to Punta Delgada and back.

 

FNO
Andrew
minimized a 46-minute delay, griping
“South West Railway. On time 40 minutes late.”

 

Michael R.
, who we’ve seen a lot of in these parts,
drew our attention to a breaking alert just 21 seconds old.
“ABCDEFG1 at 21:06:57 which is before 21:07:18 in Canning Town/London”

 

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”, asked
Sandra von I.

“The railways of the Netherlands are great. Fast, clean
trains connecting all the cities and towns of the country.
But it turns out that the status displays on board need
a little help waking up…”

 

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