Everything I learned from Scotrail’s automated station announcements

Just occasionally, something good happens on the internet. 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.

You can play Matt Eason’s ambient music mix, with four different beats to choose from, as well as setting the ScotRail announcement volume, frequency, and delay over (or under) the music.

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, & platforms

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 destinations & train operating companies 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 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 “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:

Jonn Elledge is a former writer and editor at the New Statesman, as well as the founder and editor of the CityMetric website for many years (now CityMonitor.ai). He is now publishes his thoughts on The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything, and freelances for other publications. This piece was first published on his Newsletter.