BORK!BORK!BORK! Strange things are afoot at Brighton Station as football fans keen to make the journey to London to see their team take on England's finest instead found themselves destined for Addr = 67 (43h).

While the background of the image supplied by an eagled-eyed Register reader might show the impressive architecture of Brighton Station, originally constructed in the 1840s, it is the foreground where problems lie.

The platform board appears to be showing its undergarments in the form of an identifier and serial connection information.

The baleful amber glow emitted by today's dot matrix boards might permit greater flexibility, but this writer remembers when the boards had a fixed set of destinations that flipped over with a delightful ticking noise. Before that, station staff put up printed boards.

Indeed, there was a time when trains on the Brighton line would serve up a toasted bacon sandwich in the morning as the carriages stopped at stations with only a printed plank of wood wedged into a receptacle to give a clue about future stops and the final destination.

Then the only bork possible would have been from a poorly mounted printed board falling and striking an unwary passenger.

Now we have active displays and the potential for all manner of borkage inflicted on unfortunate commuters. Heck, if you're a proper rail enthusiast, it is even possible to acquire your own station departure or arrival boards, or view a simulacrum via a web page.

As for this board, unless the likes of Hassocks and Preston Park have been renamed to DATA and SYNC, it looks like it is displaying its privates while awaiting instruction from the mothership.

Brighton Station is owned by Network Rail and managed by Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR). A GTR spokesperson told The Register that the display was likely caused by a reset. The spokesperson said: "At any given time there's probably at least one screen on our network that looks like this for a few seconds."

Any longer, and the display would apparently be declared faulty (though we note our reader said it was stuck in this state for "ages").

So now you know.

And there's always that mighty 19200 baud rate, which should send data speeding along in the way that UK trains... sometimes don't.

The bork desk has temporarily reopened. If you've seen some technology misbehaving in the wild, send us an email with your snapshot. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/09/04/bork/