Today's post is about three perplexing purple signs - one on the platforms, one on the trains and one outside a station.
I was waiting at Bond Street when a train came through the station without stopping. And this flashed up on the doors.
But there was no need to 'stand clear' because there's a whopping great glass wall between the train and the platform. The doors weren't going to open, the train couldn't possibly come into contact with anyone and there was nothing to stand clear of. There was also an announcement to the same effect.
Obviously some kind of wording is needed to tell passengers that the next train doesn't stop here, and 'passing train - please stand clear' is shorter than most. But that doesn't stop the message being fundamentally unnecessary, and perhaps you too might have rolled your eyes when you saw it.
You've probably seen this blue sign stuck to certain doors on Crossrail trains. It's there because at some stations the train is longer than the platform so selective door opening has to be used. It's plainly a good idea to advise passengers of this, especially at the precise moment they're manically pressing the button wondering why the door won't open.
What I hadn't realised was quite how many doors have these blue stickers, indeed it's most of them, indeed only 6 of the 27 doors don't.
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This seems potentially OTT, but let's investigate why it is that 78% of the doors on a purple train might not open.
12 Crossrail stations have short platforms as depicted on this helpful poster.
The Crossrail station with the shortest platforms is Hanwell. Here the rear 8 doors don't open - that's the entire 9th and 8th carriage plus the rear two doors of the 7th carriage. And of course trains operate in both directions so these stickers also have to appear on the 1st and 2nd carriages as well as the first two doors of the 3rd carriage. Hanwell explains most of the door stickers.
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But it doesn't explain five of the stickers in the middle. The central stickers seem odd because the middle carriages always end up beside the platform at whatever Crossrail station it is.
Well, an additional issue occurs at Paddington High Level station where some of the platforms are quite curved... more curved than Crossrail trains were designed to deal with. To mitigate this the middle doors of the rear six carriages don't open, just in case the train pulls in at one of the affected platforms with a gaping chasm in just the wrong place. Again trains go both ways and might conceivably change direction, so the stickers have to go on every single middle door not just the rear six.
You might think that purple trains no longer use Paddington High Level station, not since through-running started in November, but on Sunday mornings, late at night and during engineering works they still do and so the middle door stickers are still needed.
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Pad'n HL
What I can't work out is why the rear door of carriage 3 and the front door of carriage 7 have stickers saying the doors might not open, when I think they always do. Passengers waiting by these doors are being warned about something that never happens, which doesn't seem a particularly good idea.
Also all the stickers are the same. I can see the point of a generic sticker in the 1st, 2nd, 8th and 9th carriages. At least five stations have platforms too short to accommodate the rear two carriages, so a generic "These doors will not open at certain stations" sticker makes sense.
But in carriages 3 to 7 it might make more sense if the stickers said "These doors may not open at Hanwell" or "These doors may not open at Paddington High Level" or "These doors may not open at Hanwell or Paddington High Level" rather than worrying passengers entirely unnecessarily. Just a thought.
In summary, here's how many of Crossrail's 41 stations I think these stickers apply to.
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...and generally only at one end of the train, not both.
These blue stickers are so ubiquitous, so vague and many so infrequently relevant that they probably end up as superfluous background noise. And two needn't even be there at all.
This bright yellow sign is positioned prominently outside several stations, for example here at Canary Wharf.
Planned Elizabeth line closures - Check before you travel this weekend... fair enough.
But what you really want to know is whether the line is closed this weekend and where, and this poster doesn't tell you that. Annoyingly nor does the link the QR code directs you to, which is TfL's Journey Planner webpage. Sure you can take time to enter your starting point and destination and date and time of travel and see what the algorithm suggests, but that still won't specifically tell you which bits of the Elizabeth line might be closed.
What you want is a link to line closures on the Elizabeth line this weekend, which can be found quickly on the Status updates webpage here, or even a pdf of all the closures over the next six months which can be found here. Better still would be a simple list of closures over the next few weeks, which TfL always produce as a poster but never provide online where it could be very useful.
What's more you'll find that very poster at the bottom of the Canary Wharf escalator, so if you have been battling with the QR code and the Journey Planner website on the way down you've been wasting your time.
There are no trains this weekend between Stratford and Shenfield, it turns out, and trains won't be stopping at Acton Main Line, West Ealing, Hanwell and Heathrow T5. So passengers at Canary Wharf probably needn't worry this weekend, but the big yellow sign raises doubts and worries anyway. Perhaps hide it away when it isn't necessary, or at least add a useful QR code rather than expecting passengers to do all the hard work themselves.
