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When passengers rush across station concourses to catch their trains at the last moment, it can be dangerous.
Network Rail are trialling a system to combat it: three minutes before long-distance trains leave London’s King’s Cross, operators will remove information from departure boards.
The theory is that late-running commuters will arrive at the station, look at the boards, assume they’ve missed their train and wait for the next one. This ignores three realities.
1. Regular passengers often know the departure time of their train and the platforms from which they normally leave.
2. Train information is widely available on third-party apps and websites, used by a large number of commuters.
3. Due to aging infrastructure and network inefficiencies, platform details at some stations are regularly unavailable until very shortly before departure time. The new system will squeeze that time further.
