What the general opinion of the large electronic display above the main concourse at Manchester Piccadilly? See pic of same below...
I like it, it's not perfect but much better than a traditional departures board that only shows the final destination of the services.
It is *big* though, fine for Manchester Piccadilly but i'm not sure how many stations could fit a display like that in a place where it didn't cause crowd control problems.
In Manchester, the operator name serves reasonably effectively to distinguish fast trains from stoppers (and only a relatively small number of stations are served by both from Manchester anyway), I suspect if you wanted to deploy a similar sign at somewhere like kings cross you would want to distinguish fast trains from stoppers somehow and/or suppress services that are scheduled to be overtaken.
I find that very useful, wondering if the train company names could be shortened to abbreviations to reduce the clutter?
Some of the operator names have already been shortened to fit them on the screen. I don't think using the 2 letter abbreviations as used in timetables would be a great idea, especially as many of them don't have anything to do with the current name of the operator.
Station names have also been shortened, some seem to have simply been truncated at arbitary locations ("church stretto" "Clarbeston Roa" , "Deansgate G Me" etc), some are clearly deliberately chosen shorternings ("Birmingham N S" , "Blackpool Nrth", "Buckshaw Pkwy", "Horwich Pkwy", "Manchester O R" etc)
and some you can't really tell whether they were simply truncated automatically or whether someone through about it and decided the simple truncation was in fact the best abbrevation ("Adlington Ches", "Birmingham Int", "Burscough Brid", "Chapel En Le F" etc)
If I want Manchester Airport, should I aim for platform 9 (and the 10:14 Northern train - do I have time to catch it?) or platform 3 (and the 10:24 TPE)?
Depends how fit you are
Personally I'd probably head for the northern train knowing that with a 10 minuite gap, if I missed it I'd still have time to get the TPE.
Yeah it's not perfect and in corner cases like this you do need some local knowledge to do the best thing. Local knowledge in this case would say there isn't much opportunity for overtaking on the airport line, so the first departure to the airport is probably the first arrival, OTOH for sheffield you are likely to be better off waiting for a TPE or EMR service.