Letter: Letters : Time dilation

From Steve Plater

Sevenoaks, Kent

Your observation about Connex South Central’s “91.59 per cent on time” claim
was well made (Feedback, 24 May).

But actually it’s worse than that. Train companies also try to pervert the
English language by defining “on time” (or “to time”) as not more than 5 minutes
over the timetabled arrival time—in other words, late. So a journey
supposed to take 30 minutes can, in railspeak, be 15 per cent late and still “on
time”.

The inevitable result of this form of thinking is that they will consider a
train 10 minutes late to be really only 5 minutes past the “on time” limit, and
slowly but surely “to time” will become “not more than 10 minutes” late.

Another example of railspeak: “the 08.24 service is running 15 minutes late”
—a curious sense of the word “service”.