As in any field, a specialised lexicon of shorthand, nicknames, jargon, personality types, and rules of thumb have developed for transport and the places it connects. This new column collects some of the more interesting and obscure examples. No claim of completeness or usefulness is made. Authorship is attributed where clear or generally accepted.
Miscellanies had been popular since the seventeenth century, as catch-all books on a subject or range of subjects, but had died off early in the twentieth century. They were resurrected in 2002 with the publication of Schott’s Original Miscellany.
Autonomous People you’ll meet in Transport
- APRIL – Assessment of Pricing of Roads In London model, for the original London Congestion Charging Research Programme, to evaluate the impact of road pricing. See also her twin AREAL.
- AREAL – Area Licensing model used to estimate the proportion of journeys that would pay a charge.
- JESSICA – Joint European Support for Sustainable Investment in City Areas, initiative of the European Commission.
- LENNON – Latest Earnings Network Nationally Over Night, the rail industry’s revenue and ticketing database which records each leg of passengers’ rail travel, to work out the fare allocation to operators overnight.
- LUCAS – London Underground Combined Access System smartcard scheme, for construction and engineering workers to access their work on London Underground.
- DARWIN – The National Rail public information service which predicts the real time arrival times of trains.
- MOIRA – Model of Inter-Regional Activity modeling tool, which estimate the impact of changes in rail services.
- PAMELA – Pedestrian Accessibility Movement Environment Laboratory, at the University College London. PAMELA also has her own bus for experimentation on passengers.
- Sherlock – Computer system at TfL’s Lost Property Office near Baker Street Tube, which logs lost items.
- ZEUS – Zero Emission Urban Bus System, a European bus project.
And some of the places they work
- BATCAVE – Headquarters of the British Rail Business Analysis of Train Services (BATS) system at Marylebone.
- TARDIS – TOPS Ancillary Retrospective Data Information System, which creates railway asset utilisation reports.
- THUDD – Transport, Highways and Urban Development Directorate ministry planning unit.
- WEFOC – Wembley European Freight Operating Centre in Brent. Pronounced as spelt.
Three Induced Demand Traffic Theories
- Braess Paradox – adding a road to a road network can cause a redistribution of the flow such that the total travel time increases. A reverse example is the closing of New York’s 42nd Street, a busy crosstown road in 1990, which was expected to cause a traffic nightmare. Instead, the flow of traffic actually improved.
- Pigou-Knight-Downs Paradox – Adding extra road capacity does not reduce travel time.
- Downs-Thomson Paradox – States that the equilibrium speed of car traffic on the road network is determined by the average door-to-door speed of equivalent journeys by public transport.
Nouns, Modern, Collective, Transport
- an abundance of caution(s)
- an avalanche of errors
- a bank of escalators
- a bank of lifts
- a blizzard of emails
- a blur of opticians
- a bonfire of vanities (ie politicians)
- a bouquet of kisses
- a brothel of corruption
- a clutch of shops
- a company of dancers
- a conflagration of arsonists
- a coterie of mistresses
- a coterie of readers
- a deck of slides
- a desert of buses, almost always followed by a platoon of buses
- an embarrassment of riches
- an explosion of destructadors (those who crayon destroying buildings to build new rail lines)
- a farm of servers
- a firestorm of controversy
- a firestorm of criticism
- a flight of stairs
- a flight of trains (sequentially through a choke point or track)
- a fleet of power plants
- a forest of condos
- a hassle of paperwork
- an impertinence of salespeople
- an isochrome of geographers
- a legion of trainspotters
- a minefield of legal issues
- a pack of crayonistas
- a raft of product launches
- a ring of spies
- a sea of parking
- a sea of troubles
- a slew of mysteries
- a spate of works
- a stable of models
- a stand of trees
- a subset of mathematicians
- a swarm of drones
- a swirl of rumours
- a torrent of data
- a world of hurts
- a wunch of bankers
Picky… but isn’t not “DARWIN” as it not an acronym. It’s “NRE Darwin” the NRE being National Rail Enquiries.
A couple more:
HAROLD – Huddersfield Adhesion & Rolling contact Laboratory Dynamics rig
LABRADOR – Low Adhesion Braking Dynamic Optimisation for Rolling Stock (LABRADOR) Simulation Model
Both specialist tools for assessing the performance of rolling stock. The first is hardware, and the second is a software modelling tool. Both have been acclaimed in the industry.
As a former banker I was going to add a collective term to the list, but you beat me to it at the last second!
What about O.R.C.A.T.S?(Operational Resarch Computerised Allocation of Tickets to Services).The rail industry’s means of allocating revenues from interavailable tickets to train operating companies.Originally set up by British Rail and now run by the Rail Delivery Group.
Also its offspring “Orcats raiding” where different operators have services on the same or part of the same route to gain a share of the revenue.
@Hugh Steavenson
I have a different list of mythical (and actual) beasts in transport, which I’ll publish in the next Miscellany installment. Cheers!
ETHEL – Electric Train Heating Ex-Locomotive. An old loco placed behind a steam engine to provide heat and light to to carriages not equipped with steam heating. As far as i can tell they were all gone by 1994.
ooh, a BAT cave!
Back in the day, before local administrations in Denmark were rearranged, one area’s public transport company was Bornholms Amts Trafik. With the obvious acronym.
Their carnet tickets (“rabatkort”, from “rabat” meaning discount, and “kort” = card) were styled RaBATkort.
And, when checking, even though Bornholms Amt is now called something completely different, the public transport company has kept their name. They are still BAT. Although I’m sad to see they have stopped printing the word RaBATkort on the carnet tickets.
https://webshop.bat.dk/webshops-forside/klippekort/voksen-1-zone/
Love this.
The collective nouns list seems to be reference lexicon for lazy journalists!
BOTTOMS – The system used as a fallback when TOPS failed – Back On To The Old Manual System
I suggest a price of consultants, with megaprice likelier in practice.