py_megapixel
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Yes, unfortunately they didn't upload properly. I think I've fixed it now - if you still can't see them maybe try refreshing the page?
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Avanti West Coast: Standard Premium
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It works now, thanks. I have some Jamaican Dollars so a 1/2p upgrade to First sounds great to me!
I wonder if the software cannot handle the £ sign?
TBH, I rarely look at them, so well 'spotted'.
Journeyman
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The "£" sign isn't a standard character in most ASCII-related character sets, and clearly when those displays were installed and programmed, they had a specific use which didn't include this sort of information, so no provision was made for special characters.It works now, thanks. I have some Jamaican Dollars so a 1/2p upgrade to First sounds great to me!
I wonder if the software cannot handle the £ sign?
TBH, I rarely look at them, so well 'spotted'.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
I'm fairly sure I've seen £ displayed on one before, possibly in the context of Weekend First upgrades. The scrolly message is I think just typed in by the guard, so it was perhaps an error.
py_megapixel
Established Member
Is it not set remotely by Avanti control? I've definitely seen the exact same message multiple times on different trains ("PEAK TIME TRAIN" for example)
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
I've seen lots of wordings of that so I don't believe so.
Grumpy Git
On Moderation
Indeed, $ is ASCII #36 whereas the £ is ASCII #163
There was a proprietary system from a Japanese manufacturer I briefly encountered many years that used a custom codepage with room for two currency symbols. The original version encoded "$" and "£", but in 1999 they changed them to "$" and "€"
To be pedantic ASCII is a 7 bit character set. It doesn't have a 163
Grumpy Git
On Moderation
Exactly, so anything assigned a # above 127 is part of an 'extended' character set.
I tried out Standard Premium (my brain hurts just thinking about those two words next to each other) having got to my connecting station early and chancing it with a service reported as "full due to covid regulation". This was a Glasgow service to Euston and I boarded at Wigan. At £25 from Wigan I felt price gouged as anyone travelling from Glasgow would have got a much better deal for the extra 2-ish hours they had at "Standard Premium" as they paid £30. I think £20 from Wigan would have felt more appropriate.
Journeyman
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I'd happily pay the £25, as I place a high value on the better seat.
voyagerdude220
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I agree in that I feel £25 is a bit much for Wigan to London. I'm assuming Manchester/Liverpool/Preston to London is also £25?
Having said that, I suppose if the cost was too cheap, the Standard Premium accommodation would quickly become rather overcrowded, somewhat defeating the purpose of it.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
The Off Peak Return is £94.50, so £50 on top for both ways gives you a multiplier of 1.53. Sounds reasonable to me.
Absolutely cracking value against the Anytime.
Just looked up the off-peak return price for Glasgow to Euston its £108.50, again surprised it's only £14 more ... might consider booking as that and start late / break journey in some fashion to later in the month make a leisure trip to Glasgow!
Back to the topic at hand
The multiplier is in the same ballpark with the extra £60 so that must be how they worked it out then rounded the amount.
In both cases as a traveler from the north west if still feels like a Glasgow passenger is getting the better deal.
Back to the topic at hand
The multiplier is in the same ballpark with the extra £60 so that must be how they worked it out then rounded the amount.
In both cases as a traveler from the north west if still feels like a Glasgow passenger is getting the better deal.
Scotrail314209
Established Member
I'm sure weekend first used to be about £20 from Wigan, or maybe £15 as it was around £15 from Preston?
If someone can clarify, then it seems a bit sketchy to increase the price by £10.
If someone can clarify, then it seems a bit sketchy to increase the price by £10.
Manchester is also £25. I used Standard Premium on Saturday from Euston and with no announcements having been made, I was unsurprised to see that the only other occupant of Coach G was a lost First Class passenger.
Obobru
Member
Used it 4 times now between Manchester and London and RTN. Always been an announcement on the train about upgrading, always been a conductor checking and charging upgrades and had always been a few others in the carriage, I think the lowest I have seen was 3 of us and highest about 7.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
It does. FirstGroup really are not good at this sort of thing.
The standard ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) character set, the most common standard 8 bit extension of ASCII, especially in Western Europe, forms the basis of all further Unicode extensions and includes the £ sign but not €, with that being Unicode #8364 and requiring at least 16 bits to be encoded, with £ retaining its original position. If the Pendolino displays genuinely are incapable of showing a £ sign then they must use an extremely limited character set. Another thing which is utterly inept.
Is there a price list somewhere?
I know it's "£15-£30" but surely a table of prices would be a reasonable request, so you can make a decision before joining the carriage.
Specifically I will be traveling Carlisle - Wolverhampton and Birmingham International - Preston next week.
I know it's "£15-£30" but surely a table of prices would be a reasonable request, so you can make a decision before joining the carriage.
Specifically I will be traveling Carlisle - Wolverhampton and Birmingham International - Preston next week.
Former is £25, latter is £15. I don't think there's a published price list/table on their website, but you can see the cost of the upgrade if you search on BR Fares - it's underneath the Off-Peak Single.
py_megapixel
Established Member
The thing is when they were installed the expectation was that they would show service information and little else. 7-bit ASCII was probably considered fine - it includes the letter and numbers, the colon, and sufficient basic punctuation to write sentences about any possible service disruption. I'd agree though that it would have future-proven it a lot more if they had made more characters available.
Of course these days Unicode is pretty common even on embedded systems such as this, but it probably wasn't in the early 2000s when the Pendolinos were being designed.
What I’m thinking is the Pendolinos have come from Italy, where ISO-8851-1 is the bare minimum required to properly show Italian, as well as other Western European languages, in other countries where Pendolinos were sold. Surely this would make 7 bit ASCII unsuitable.
py_megapixel
Established Member
Being built in Italy doesn't mean they have to be suitable for running Italian services. Neither does it mean those displays feature in all Pendolinos, or that they are unique to Pendolinos - in fact the same displays feature on Voyagers, which were built by a completely different manufacturer.
In any case the first Pendolinos were built at Washwood Heath in the west midlands - it's only the later batch that was built in Italy.
But did the design not come from Italy before they were built at the former Metro Cammell works. All 11 car Pendolinos have at least 2 carriages built in Italy. Did the Pendolinos have their 9th vehicle built at Washwood Heath or in Italy?
A more pressing question is can the Voyagers display a £ sign?
You might just be overthinking this a bit.
Surely the more pressing question is how much would it cost, and how long would it take, to reconfigure the pendos to display the £ sign? While I can understand it wasn't priority no.1, surely Virgin were considering the possibility of using them to advertise upgrades, so to not have included it for the sake of 7-bit vs 16-bit seems a tad silly.
Of course, it'll probably involve a hardware change and the software will now no longer be supported, so it'll manage to cost £15m.
Grumpy Git
On Moderation
I'll be someone on the programming screen at Avanti who can't use it quite properly.
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