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Countdown timers come to the Reading Line
By roadman on Fri, 02/19/2010 - 10:13am
As of this morning, the new "train arrival system" countdown timers have been activated on the Reading/Haverhill line, at least at the stations between Wakefield and Greenwood.
With the new system in place, most of the annoying "nanny" messages have gone away. Between the 'countdown' timer, which displays about every thirty seconds, there was only one "non-train" message advising folks to renew their monthly passes online. Not sure if this welcome lack of clutter on the boards is a permanent condition or not.
Interesting thing about the countdown, in that it displays "Next Boston Train In :XX" until two minutes before the train arrives, and then goes completely blank from then on. The signs also do NOT display information about outbound trains, at least for now.
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Comments
Cone of silence
Must be like when spaceships re-enter the atmosphere and there's that two-minute disruption in radio contact.
Now. no wait... Now.
Well, arrival time is kind of a 'best guess' based on GPS, train speed, etc. It's not really goign to count down to the second, so I can see not having a final countdown. The SL countdown switched to "arriving" when a bus is 1-70 seconds away. BUT - they could to better than being blank, and just switch to "Train arriving within 2 minutes"
I hope "between Wakefield and Greenwood" includes those stations themselves, as they are consecutive stations on the line, and there is nothing 'between' them. :)
Yes, it's all stations from Wakefield to Greenwood inclusive
I presume other stations north of Wakefield are also now "on-line", but I don't ride that far.
Im not familiar with those
Im not familiar with those stations, but if there are two platforms, maybe only the one on the other side would show the outbound trains?
All the stations in question have a double sided sign mounted
above the inbound platform, and NO signs above the outbound platform. However, the signs above the inbound platform are easily visible from the outbound platform.
Also, in the past, these signs would routinely display delay information for specific outbound trains as well as information about the inbound ones.
I wonder if this will be as
I wonder if this will be as effective as the "T-Alerts" I get in email. The other day I was taking the 5:55pm Reading train out of North Station. At 5:51 they announced a delay. We finally boarded and left the station at 6:10. At 6:20pm I received a message on my phone saying the 5:55pm Reading train would be delayed 15 minutes. Good to know!
The countdowns have only been in operation a couple of days,
but they appear to be accurate. What will be interesting is to see if they include a "train delayed" flag when the train is running behind schedule.
BTW, I somehow avoided the delay you noted, but I agree with you about a) not posting the delay until less than 5 minutes before departure and b) the lag time in issuing the alerts. I normally take the 5:55 Reading train at night, but have managed to catch the 5:35 Haverhill train on most nights recently.