I've always been intrigued as to why when we can put the proverbial man on the moon, the railways can't keep track of 3 or 4 trains going up and down between Baking & Gospel Oak, or make sensible announcements.
The lateness shown on the platform indicator rarely ties up with the audio announcements and a couple of times recently the audio announcements have worked up to being 13 minutes late and then reverted to less than half that time. Other announcements have opined that the train is x minutes late, when it's already more than x minutes past the time it should have left.
After a cancelled train, the audio announcement a couple of times has been "The next train to arrive at platform 1 will be the xx.xx from Gospel Oak", giving the departure time from Gospel Oak over half an hour before.
As to the on line information, it's pretty useless. Unless the information is available in time to be used to plan an alternative journey, it is no good. In practice, we finish up going to the station to find out what's going on. It's not impressive.
With a simple route like the B&GO, they should be able to predict problems fairly well. If a train service to Barking is cancelled, they know the return journey will be as well. If a train's running 10 minutes late one way, whilst there is some recovery time at each end, it is a useful prediction of lateness in the other direction.
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