In the same carriage as me was a passenger who was intending to travel to WAT but, because the 1130 SWR» service to London was delayed (35 mins), he had boarded the wrong train. This despite a number of quite specific PA▸ announcements at EXC regarding the order of train arrival.
My question is: Can the PIS▸ displays be manually overridden to reflect the actual situation so passengers don't receive conflicting information? The displays at EXC are of the type which display full details of the 1st train and a summary of the 2nd & 3rd services - 1L44 was always shown as the first departure.
(It probably didn't help that the passenger concerned was 'Eastern European' and possibly not that familiar with UK▸ rail travel.)
There must be an insider on here somewhere who can answer this question definitively, but from my own experience I don't think that they can be overridden locally.
They can, however be changed somewhere in the system. There is a standard train pattern at Bath where something southbound (ie. to Westbury and usually beyond) departs at 9 minutes past the hour, and the London comes in shortly behind. I have been at Bath on at least two occasions when one the southbound service has been delayed and runs behind the London, and the departure boards (both the one-line summary board and the detailed one) have been changed. On one recent occasion they changed more than once, as it became clear that Control was having a difference of opinion on which one to send out from Bristol first
Manual PA announcements were made in all cases.
On another occasion some years ago I was on a St Pancras to Dover - non stop to Ashford then all stations. We were held for 20 minutes at STP because of an idiot trespasser, and the decision was taken to skip the intermediate stops between Ashford and Dover (I believe this was a
DOO▸ service as I never saw another staff member on the train). A manual announcement was made before Ashford that passengers to intermediate stations should change, but the automated announcements kept going. On departure from Ashford the driver came on to tell passengers to ignore the automatic announcements, so he clearly couldn't shut the thing off.
Needless to say, however, there were a number of irritated passengers on that train who ended up unexpectedly at Dover because they took no notice of the manual announcement.
If passengers insist on not listening to announcements made over a PA system (such as at EXC as indicated above), nobody can be blamed but the passengers themselves if they end up on the wrong train or at the wrong station. But that said, the display boards should have been updated and that certainly didn't help. I won't go into the Eastern European issue because exactly the same thing could have happened to a deaf white bloke from Honiton who was waiting for that train.
