The Talkie T train has been drinking; my necktie is asleep

[spatch]

Many of our T trains feature automated station announcements; we've called them "Talkie T" ever since they came out in the late 90s. It's all computerized and you might think it would be easy to keep running smoothly, but sometimes Talkie T gets tired of saying the same things and decides to do a little improvisation of its own. Here are some of the station stops and announcements my Red Line train just made around 10:45 this morning:

• Davisporter (would be a great band name but someone kind of beat Talkie T to it in a roundabout way.)
• Porter SqUmass
• Davis-Savin Hi-JFK/UMass (We had pulled into Charles for that one.)
• The destination of this train is for the commuter rail.

Now I've heard the misplaced station announcements before, like the day when every station was Mattapan, but I've never heard the segmented vocal pieces stitch together a train destination announcement and a "change here for..." announcement. But you know, we were on a Braintree-bound train and Braintree has commuter rail connections, so technically Talkie T wasn't lying. Maybe it didn't realize that.

Comments

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

I think Toronto's new trains are going to be talkie trains. We already have some talkie buses. They also have a little display panel that shows the name of the next stop in bright amber letters.

I suspect, however, that the drivers who don't bother to call the stops when the bus is packed to the gills and the windows are too muddy to see out of will also forget to turn on the notification system. I've already ridden a few equipped buses who aren't talking and whose display panels just read 'System Paused'.