please empty your brain below

"Elephant and Castle
Unlike the Tube station, the area does not have an ampersand (&)

Online exception: Use the ampersand (&) for both station and area "

Someone had better tell the people that make bus destination blinds then for yesterday I saw a bus going to "Elephant & Castle".
@Flippy
Perhaps it was going to the station?

"Customers" - hate it: suggests they are only interested in our money. Also e.g "customers for Kings Cross should change at........" suggests we want to buy the station - only true if I'm playing Monopoly.

Surely the first word in that final sentence should be "pretend", not "show"?

And why use "the Capital" at all? "London" is shorter and clearer.


Thank you for the explanation,DG. All I can say is - Good Grief!
"Don't mention the war" is my favourite.
"Earls Court Unlike the Tube station, neither the area nor the exhibition centre have an apostrophe."

Should it not be "neither the area nor the exhibition centre HAS an apostrophe"?
The use of irrelevant capital letters slows down the reader. It's why many publications no longer use capital letters for job titles. Ampersands too. I fear the use of Capital was a decision made by marketing much to the annoyance of the sub editors.
I didn't realise such a document formally exists.

Snippets.

I always have a problem with "line". TfL says "Use lower case when referring to Tube lines: Hammersmith & City line; Northern line". This looks best especially on signage but most people would argue it is, strictly speaking, wrong. The trouble is that it is inconsistent with National Rail convention So the Chiltern Line shares tracks with the Metropolitan line.

Please to see they distinguish between anticipate and expect.

Bit puzzled by a police force service being a collective noun. The Metropolitan Police Service is looking into it sounds correct to me and the Metropolitan Police are looking into it doesn't.

I shall of course make a note of terms they don't approve of and do my best to use them. Long live the East London Line! (note the capital L in line because it isn't an Underground line).
Thankfully, the style guide does not obey its own instruction to use customers rather than pasengers - there are three other instances in these extracts!
An inconsistency here:
"London Overground - Do not refer to as 'Overground'"

BUT 'Overground Willesden Junction - Clapham Junction'

Shouldn't that be "LONDON Overground Willesden Junction - Clapham Junction"?

And if "Tube" is now synonymous with Underground, what term do you use when you specifically want to discuss the lines and trains built to fit 3.5m diameter tunnels?
The writing rule for "Capital" seems to have been in TfL's style guide for at least two years. It already appeared in this copy which is from 2012, according to document metadata.
Earls Court exhibition entre is now closed and will be soon torn down anyway, so they should remove it from the Tube announcement (alight for...).
I immensely dislike the term customer for passenger, wish they would change it back.
"When writing about consultations, be open and honest. Show that we care about people's views"

Honestly? You sure this particular guideline wasn't published 1st April?

I too object to being called a 'customer' rather than a 'passenger'. There really isn't that much to do at an Overground station, still less an Underground one - other than wait for an appropriately destined train!
ELL has gone from 16 characters to 79. I wonder how long they spent trying to make that a tidy 80 for 5x the space.
Santander Cycles! Good grief!
Whatever next? Virgin Velocipedes?

Suppose they're going to paint all the blue ex-Boris bikes red now instead!
Bronchitikat, there is plenty to do at an Underground station, you can buy fruit, flowers, cakes, coffee, newspapers, magazines, sim cards, pick up your shopping.
@Cornish Cockney
Just red stickers, but after a slow start they are getting close to 50% now
http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/04/37/63/4376338_a90a53cb.jpg

Unfortunately the docking stations are harder to spot now, as they are the same colour as bus stops, pillar boxes and telephone kiosks.

The really rare ones now are the Tour de France-linked ones.
http://londonist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/WP_20150320_006.jpg
I usually pick one of those if there is one - much more visible to other road users. perhaps it should be sponsored by Shell, or Post-It or DHL or, if it has to be a bank, Raffeissen Bank of Austria.
DON'T MENTION THE WAR!!!!
I'm sure it is easy to pick holes in this, but I thought it was an honest and thoughtful guide.

I know it's trendy to complain about falling standards, but I think the written English produced by officialdom these days is far better than what was produced in the past.
One of my pet hates (apart of course from "customers") is the use of the royal "We." (As in, "......while we fix a signal failure" etc).

On the whole the document is good in that it encourages the correct use of grammar without using Americanisms and I don't doubt I could learn something from it, but there are some gems therein.

My favourite is probably, "When mentioning the Commissioner of Transport for London always refer to Sir Peter Hendy CBE!"
Does anybody know why passengers have to be called 'customers'? Airlines don't do it do they?
George Orwell wrote about this in 1984. Its called doublespeak. Someone at TFL gets paid a 6 figure salary to come up with this crap
@ Martin Mason, most organisations have style guides, though not all are as detailed as TfL's. They cover necessary topics like preferred layout, typeface and colors, to ensure consistency in all publications. For an organisation as large as TfL, further guidance is probably necessary; many people are good at their job but not expert at writing about it.
One of my (many) "gripes" is the term "incident" when "something" happens at a station or on the (rail, tube, etc) network. Tells "us" what it is...so we are better informed and can make a decision based on fact as to what to do.
There could be many reasons for referring to many events as "incidents" rather than being more specific. But an important one which springs to mind is to avoid causing extra distress when the incident happens to involve someone dying or getting seriously hurt. If someone close to me died at a tube station, I might not want 3 million Londoners to know all about it.

By using the word "incident" such things can be more discretely hidden among more prosaic things like umbrellas getting jammed in doors.
I have noticed a lot of rail companies use the term " an unusually large passanger flow" to describe issues caused by overcrowding.
Aha! so 'customers' when they're spending money, 'passengers' when they're just getting in the way?
@ Malcolm
I understand what you mean...and I not for one minute saying we need to be told details. But perhaps some terms like "minor incident","serious incident" or "major incident"...would be more useful. Fatal RTCs are often stated as such...and in the case of those on motorways there is often televison footage (at a distance) of the damaged vehicles, this may cause distress too.
I know a lot of people dislike customer instead of passenger but I remember a discussion about this exact point when I worked for a mainline train operator. We decided customer was more positive as it implied that you wanted to treat them well not just as someone who was there out of necessity.
They perpetuate the myth that "-ize" is an Americanism; in most cases it is correct English usage, as set out in the Oxford English Dictionary. I get really annoyed by the use of "-ise" endings.

And good to see that the full stop "is no longer used after abbreviations, so use Mr not Mr. and eg not e.g.". I look forward to it being removed from "St Paul's" and similar signs, where "St", being a contraction and not an abbreviation, has never required it, but it has been used for many years in error by the Underground.
I too hate the use of "customers" instead of "passengers".

Really loved the lady ticket collector on a train in the Rhein Valley who addressed us as, what translates, "Dear Journey Guests".










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