Station advert projectors

These things must be the stupidest invention ever. The boxes are huge and very very unsightly, they must take so so much power and throw out loads of heat onto the platform I would imagine ! So much for going green ! LUL is one of the most un-green companies I have ever known !

Yeah I too was shocked that the radio system needed such big loads of 'gubbins' all over the shop... makes me wonder, I understand and BTP and MET also use a similar digital system with the same handsets, I don't see big massive boxes of equipment on every street corner though...

Back onto the advert things, great world class service LUL, the posters have virtually nil benefit for punters, but the vending machines had much. I remember I was on I think it was OXO Central platform and a punter suddenly had a diabetic attack, his quick thinking friend ran to the vending machine close by and got 2 bars of chocolate and quickly fed this to him.... imagine how much longer it would take to get all the way to the surface to get a similar fix (whilst he lay on the platform dying (watching a lovely video advert on the wall))...

But the equipment isn't just in tunnel areas, I have seen it many many miles out of the way of tunnel sections (at the far east of the District for example).

I'd assume they would be pretty beefy projectors - normal ones wouldn't take kindly to being switched on and off with such frequency.

I suppose if they want to put them in to generate revenue, more fool them if it gets wasted supporting it!

on those that I've seen don't switch off - due, say, to a fault - the projected beam goes onto the roof of the train and doesn't get in anyone's way. Unless there's some over-riding need (say to do with air time for the adverts), I'd vote for leaving them on. I certainly can't see how they'd distract the T/op of an approaching trains!

I've read that the switching off as trains approach is nothing to do with safety, but instead because the advertisers don't want the adverts distorted by being projected onto the sides of trains.

Advertisers are often very strange in the requests they make..

I remember when the Heathrow Connect service started a few years back, I worked at Ealing Bdy at the time and saw the official BAA/First service briefing notes for all operational staff prior to it starting and it said:

"Should a class 360 unit be unavailable for service it must NOT be substituted with a class 332. This is because of the RBS branding carried on the first class carriages, and RBS have stipulated they don't want there good name stopping in places like Hayes and Southall"

One of my colleagues who lives in Hayes wasn't too impressed ;D

Maybe barriers should be erected at the platform edge in the areas that face directly on to one of the projection screens, lest anyone gets so 'drawn in' to the advert that they continue to step closer and closer towards it and off the edge.

Once the JNUP is finished, and the trains have to dock at pre-defined positions - and hence the doors, couldn't barriers be put up along the platform edges except for where the doors will be?

Doesn't seem to matter on the Jubbly, does it?

Anyway, I hate the moving posters on escalators, they give me a sense of vertigo.

Personally I don't mind the scrolling LCD screens but I can see how they could be distracting. I don't like the projected adverts on the tunnel wall though. For starters the colour/contrast is all wrong and the huge projector enclosures are hideous. I don't know the specifics of these particular projectors but I think you'll find the projector is much smaller than the box. I would guess the boxes are partly to keep the projectors clean as they don't like getting dirty and would fail quite quickly without some sort of protection. Obviously you can't seal something like a projector in an air tight box without some other form of cooling which must be integrated into the box.... hence the big box.

It will be interesting to see how often the lamps get changed too. Projectors tend to get a bit dim as the lamp ages so it will be interesting to see what the criteria for re-lamping is.

I seem to remember something like this being proposed in the '70s....perhaps on "Tomorrow's World"......the idea being that a series of still images,on the tunnel wall,would appear to move,like stop-frame animation,as the train passed through.
It always seemd implausible to me,for reasons I could never quite put my finger on.
Was it ever trialled?
Does anyone else remember this?

Perhaps I should clarify that by "scrolling" adverts I don't mean the LCD screens. They give me no problem at all. I mean the ones where two adverts are printed on a paper strip, which is wound round every few seconds by a good old-fashioned motor.

CBS have been putting in a lot of fibre optic cable lately, which runs from station to station, I believe the "intention" is to install mini cameras that beam light back into the tunnel rings giving the appearance of images, if it works then CBS will get approx 50k per side per section ! (who said theres no money about ?)