Most Bizarre Railway Neologism

[Merle Haggard]

Maybe being pedantic, but
An acronym is a series of letters that it's possible to say like a word. Where the letters can't read as a word, it's an initialism.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Maybe being pedantic, but
An acronym is a series of letters that it's possible to say like a word. Where the letters can't read as a word, it's an initialism.

Maybe!

Whilst there must undoubtedly be contexts in which the distinction is important, it's probably not really necessary to distinguish between acronyms and initialisms when writing for a general audience.

The broad term acronym will usually suffice.

Be interesting, though, to hear views to the contrary.

 

[zwk500]

Incidentally, the Post Office had hundreds of its own acronyms so the railways were not alone!

A family member who worked at the BBC has told me of a story where some very expensive management consultants were brought in to make the Beeb more efficient. They suggested (this is back in the '80s or so) using acronyms to increase productivity, at which point somebody produced the (fairly sizeable) volume of acronyms the BBC were already using, and asked where they would like to start. It's highly likely to be apocryphal.

 

[SargeNpton]

Train fares under BR could have been half the price if it wasn't for "acronyms" and pencils and paper having their own numbers and codes. Ridiculous looking back at it.

Every topic produces its own jargon and abbreviations so that those who deal with it on a regular basis can converse in shorthand - as long as all the participants understand the language being used. It's not a means of deliberately excluding the uninitiated, just practical.

The danger comes from when two different things get the same abbreviation/jargon and people on either side of the conversation don't realise that the other is using it in a different context.

As for pencils and paper having their own stock codes... All such supplies were ordered from the Stationery Store using the catalogue - whatever catalogue number you put on the order is what you got. Not really any different from the system used for ordering bits for your car or stuff from Argos. If it has a part number you and the stock controller both know exactly what it is,

 

[DorkingMain]

Best part of 200 different 'CCF' acronyms in use (albeit not all on the railway, of course, although many could be).

For example...

Call Control Function;

Common Connector Framework;

Combined Computer Facility;

Central Co-ordinating Facility;

Correct Classification Factor;

Claim Coverage Form;

as well as...

Colombian Coffee Federation.

"Coffee"

TCOCs (track circuit operating clips) is a favourite - pronounced "tee-cocks"

 

[D6130]

To be fair, by that stage the company was simply 'BREL' with the letters not standing for anything (officially; I mean we all know/knew where they came from in the first place).

In the general case I am always suspicious where the first word after an acronym starts with the same letter as the end of the acronym.

I thought that 'BREL' stood for 'British Rail Engineering Limited'.....in which case 'BREL Ltd' was a definite tautology.

 

[OhNoAPacer]

I can't add anything to rail acronyms but where I worked the had a love of them, the tale that amuses me was that at one time the department I worked in got a long way to putting in place a Fire Alarm Response Team, along with an acronym, it was only stopped when the instructions and procedures were being signed off and the head of departments PA spotted the acronym.

Another one earlier in my career was that one department based at Warrington was always referred to as CMS, which confused all of those from West Cumbria as to us CMS was Cumberland Motor Services.

 

[XAM2175]

BR was very good at acronyms. BRUTE - British Rail Universal Trolley Equipment - was another one.

In a similar vein of quality - though I appreciate not from GB - the main control system for station display screens and non-local PA announcements on the Melbourne metropolitan system is known as PRIDE; Passenger Real-time Information Dissemination Equipment

Less impressive is that relies on input from POTS; the deeply-imaginative Position-of-Trains System.

Every topic produces its own jargon and abbreviations so that those who deal with it on a regular basis can converse in shorthand - as long as all the participants understand the language being used. It's not a means of deliberately excluding the uninitiated, just practical.

Indeed, and noting of course that many terms of art can outlive the understanding that originally informed them. One that often caused some puzzlement when I was working in cinema was the use of "SR-D" to describe a Dolby Digital soundtrack, explained by the fact that when the technology was being introduced to technicians in 1992 it was described as an analogue Dolby Stereo SR soundtrack (hence "SR") accompanied by a digital track.

 

[Energy]

PIS/CIS - massively shortens the names, differentiates between two different systems.

Passenger Information System - onboard the train
Customer Information System - at the station

 

[Mcr Warrior]

Suspect that there are more than a few acronyms in common use which are actually "backronyms" (i.e. an acronym deliberately formed from a phrase whose initial letters spell out a particular word) which have invariably been (somewhat clumsily) cobbled together.

 

[etr221]

In my field, we had TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms). So TLA was a TLA. And later XTLAs, which likewise were XTLAs - eXtended Three Letter Acronyms. Couldn't have been FLAs, because FLA is not an FLA.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

Back under the Midland Mainline franchise, performance collapsed to the extent that the MD was removed and David Franks came in as MD and Tim Shoveller as Ops Director. They came up with a recovery plan called Project SPEED (Service Performance Enhancements to Eliminate Delay), which was very successful.

And now we have another Project SPEED:

Rail Project SPEED (Swift, Pragmatic and Efficient Enhancement Delivery) was jointly developed by the Department for Transport (DfT) and Network Rail last summer. Infrastructure projects at different stages of development have been reviewed to identify how government funding could go further and work could be carried out faster.

 

[xotGD]

PTI, the one that opened this thread? What else would you call it?

Getting on or off a train.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

And now we have another Project SPEED:

Undoubtedly another clunky "backronym"!

 

[40129]

One that always amused me (and several co-workers at LT) was the acronym/abbreviation for Aldgate which was ALD. Arguably, this could of course also stood for Another Long Delay which tended to be appropriate for the S/B MML during the morning peak

 

[6Gman]

In another thread, someone made reference to the “PTI” (Platform Train Interface).

What other contrived or bizarre jargon abound in the modern rail industry?

How else would you describe the (important) subject of safety in that area ?

This is absolutely nothing new.

From the very dawn of the railways the 'track' was given the cumbersome name of 'permanent way', which spawned a lot of ambiguous abbreviations such as PWS (Permanent Way Slack [= Temporary Speed Restriction] and Permanent Way Supervisor).

When I was at primary school (which was urban with not a blade of grass in sight) we played our organised football and cricket "at the P Way".

You'll be relieved to know this was not within the 4' 8.5", but at the local BRSA Permanent Way Club grounds.

 

[PG]

One that always amused me (and several co-workers at LT) was the acronym/abbreviation for Aldgate which was ALD. Arguably, this could of course also stood for Another Long Delay which tended to be appropriate for the S/B MML during the morning peak

Mention of LU reminds me of a table of station codes which can be found here.
They are colour coded Red, Amber, and Green according to whether the code is used to describe more than 1 unique location, a location that has more than 1 code, and a location with only 1 code.
Anyone making up a new code for a new location is advised to consult the LU Location Coding System Standard S1035.

Getting on or off a train.

And the place that this risky activity occurs is at the Platform Train Interface

 

[Western Gaffer]

In the 1980s Royal Mail bought BRUTEs from BR for use in some parcel offices. I remember a sign on a door saying "BRUTES must not pass this point ".

I'm sure one of these signs made it into Private Eye at some point:

 

[Inversnecky]

In my field, we had TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms). So TLA was a TLA. And later XTLAs, which likewise were XTLAs - eXtended Three Letter Acronyms. Couldn't have been FLAs, because FLA is not an FLA.

My other half used to work at the TLA Centre at Edinburgh University - the "Centre for Teaching, Learning and Assessment". These was a photocopy of an article pinned up somewhere entitled "How I Hate TLAs - Three Letter Acronyms". Can't remember what was in it, though!

A good example of "redundant acronym syndrome".

Going way off topic, a speaker of Gaelic will recognise that "River Avon" comes from the Gaelic word abhainn, which means river, so it's called "river River"!

Also there's a Pendle Hill in England, where "pen" refers to a P Celtic word for hill, "dle" is a derivative of an old English word for hill: so it really means "hill hill hill".

 

[Western 52]

The Post Office also had wheeled containers known as MATEs. It meant Mail All-purpose Trolley Equipment I think. Sometimes they'd end up on parcel trains, so you may see a MATE and a BRUTE in a GUV! I don't think either were supposed to be conveyed on trains.

 

[TheEdge]

Getting on or off a train.

No.

That's the action most but not all people perform at the PTI but is not the PTI.

 

[Gloster]

The Post Office also had wheeled containers known as MATEs. It meant Mail All-purpose Trolley Equipment I think. Sometimes they'd end up on parcel trains, so you may see a MATE and a BRUTE in a GUV! I don't think either were supposed to be conveyed on trains.

BRUTEs were supposed to be carried by trains, although, if they are the ones I am thinking of, MATEs weren’t. In their early days there were parcels trains that were marked in the timetable as BRUTE workings and there were also Carriage Working Diagrams, etc., that would show particular vehicles as being for BRUTE traffic only. In the late 1970s I shoved plenty of BRUTEs into GUVs, CCTs, PMVs, BGs, etc.

 

[Steddenm]

I remember seeing on a South West Trains' 444 when they were testing the Desiros, the matrix board on the front and sides of the train said "PIS Test" in Bournemouth Station, and my partner at the time, a SWT guard, joked that the medical drug testing team were in!

 

[Inversnecky]

I'm sure one of these signs made it into Private Eye at some point:

This reminds me of one annoying aspect of modern forum and word processing software: the tendency to turn an all caps and thus obvious acronym into a word with a single initial capital, leading to potential confusion.

 

[Mojo]

This reminds me of one annoying aspect of modern forum and word processing software: the tendency to turn an all caps and thus obvious acronym into a word with a single initial capital, leading to potential confusion.

The default settings on programs like word should only ever do this with two initial capitals and then lowercase; so this should only cause problems for two letter phrases. Although checking the latest word version I have it doesn’t do that so must have improved better.

With regard to upper case / lower case, it depends on the style of the person / organisation writing the phrase in question as there is no set standard for it.

BBC News for instance in their style guide state that initialisms (when you pronounce it as a string of letters such as the trade union RMT) should be written in all caps, but acronyms (where you pronounce it as a word) should be written with an initial capital and then the rest in lower case (for instance the trade union Aslef). They however go onto give exceptions to the rule such as initialisms that are also real words, such as National Institute for Clinical Excellence, which could be the word nice or the place in France called Nice; phrases made up of an initialism but with something added to it, the United Kingdom Independence Party, where they believe the initialism for UK doesn’t overrule the Independence Party section; and then just acronyms that may look like an error if they weren’t in all caps.

 

[pdeaves]

Best part of 200 different 'CCF' acronyms in use (albeit not all on the railway, of course, although many could be).

An interesting one I met in a work context was MCB. Some of the equipment used to control a Manually Controlled Barrier (level crossing) was protected by a Miniature Circuit Breaker. The engineer's report needed to use MCB in two different contexts.

 

[43096]

An interesting one I met in a work context was MCB. Some of the equipment used to control a Manually Controlled Barrier (level crossing) was protected by a Miniature Circuit Breaker. The engineer's report needed to use MCB in two different contexts.

WSP has a dual meaning in the context of train adhesion: wheel slip protection (when accelerating) and wheel slide prevention (under braking).

 

[Bevan Price]

The departures board has turned in to a PIS (passenger information screen)

And I can't cope with ETH (electric train heat) turning into ETS (electric train supply)

That sounds potentially confusing. Some people might think that ETS meant the "electricity" that was used to work the loco or power cars.

 

[Lockwood]

Best part of 200 different 'CCF' acronyms in use (albeit not all on the railway, of course, although many could be).

For example...

Call Control Function;

Common Connector Framework;

Combined Computer Facility;

Central Co-ordinating Facility;

Correct Classification Factor;

Claim Coverage Form;

as well as...

Colombian Coffee Federation.

Oh, the Call Collection Form!

Something that occasionally gets mentioned at work is the CCP, which is the something something Processor. My mind always jumps to Critical Care Paramedic.

An interesting one I met in a work context was MCB. Some of the equipment used to control a Manually Controlled Barrier (level crossing) was protected by a Miniature Circuit Breaker. The engineer's report needed to use MCB in two different contexts.

Another one not within the railway jargon is that you may have a multi agency large incident where you have an Ambulance Loading Point, and the fire service set up an Aerial Ladder Platform.


Life would be too easy without stuff like this.

WRT RAS Syndrome, my favourite trick is to comment on it and include various examples, some of which are incorrect: PIN number, HIV virus, MOT test, LFT test...

 

[43096]

That sounds potentially confusing. Some people might think that ETS meant the "electricity" that was used to work the loco or power cars.

ETS is more accurate nowadays as it does rather more than heat.

That said, the original application of the ETS acronym was to HST 415V three phase supply; ETH being the normal DC or single phase AC 850V nominal supply.