On Monday night, a disembodied, digital female voice announcing the station stops on the Worcester line of the Commuter Rail led to a human conductor with exquisite comic timing cracking up the herds being carted away from their paymasters.
The system had a couple of small glitches — it arguably mispronounces Worcester (”Wooooooster”) and definitely mispronounces Natick (”Nattick”) — which led to the first spontaneous, group laughter I’ve ever heard on the commuter rail. Delay-induced groaning tends to be the only synchronized noisemaking on the Commuter Rail.
On Tuesday, we were back to human announcements, so the automated announcements may have been a test — I’ve emailed a T spokesman, but haven’t heard back yet.
Posted by Brendan Lynch
Tags: Commuter Rail, MBTA, multimedia
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