As a tube driver, and knowing what was what and background information to
many things (as any tube staff would), I soon came to realise that most
stuff reported about the tube / strikes / whatever was at best misleading
or inadequate or at worse, downright lies. As a consequence, I normally
treat any newspaper as a comic on the basis that most of what is printed
is irrelevant or rubbish!

Roger

*From:* Bruce
*Date:* Wed, 20 Apr 2011 23:14:08 +0100

"Jack Taylor" wrote:
The standard of railway-related writing has, for some while, been
plummeting steadily lower and we often lambast the BBC for their
reporting but today's efforts in the London "Evening Standard" by
their Transport Correspondent, Dick Murray, are spectacularly
dismal.

Whilst appreciating that there's a need not to baffle the general
public with too much technobabble, there really is no excuse for
the following load of tosh, from his article about Tuesday night's
shambles on the Jubilee line:

"Instead of using traffic lights trains are linked by radio waves
which 'talk' to trackside responders. These in turn send a signal
to a computer in the train engine to speed up or stop."

"One cut was to remove the reverse facility for trains. This means
they cannot circumvent any stranded carriages as they cannot be
switched at points to travel on the opposite track."

"Last night's problem appears to be more straightforward, with a
piece of signal box falling off a carriage and on to the track,
short-circuiting the power."

Traffic lights, train engines (on the Underground!), pieces of
signal *box* falling off? What has the man been on?


I share your concern about the plummeting standards of journalism.
However, there have always been problems when non-technical
journalists - whose education and training has mostly excluded any
mention of technology - write about technical matters.

The Evening Standard article you quoted is certainly no worse than
many other articles about technology by non-technical journalists.

However, some of the worst standards of "journalism" are to be found
on this newsgroup when contributors post messages about technology
(other than rail) that they know less than nothing about.