“Newbie” Skytrain blunder
As a testiment to how long it’s been since I’ve had to travel by Skytrain - primarily to SFU - I commited a newbie blunder only very recently.
The habit is to get onto any train on the Commercial Station platform since it is (was) the terminus station. So I did, on Saturday night and the train pulled into a station that is decidedly not Renfrew but some bright, new, and eerily quiet station - oh, it’s VCC-Clark. Drat. Means I have to learn which platform to board to head in the right direction… and promptly forget because I won’t do it often.
The new station was mentioned before and I’ve noticed it on the map but I guess you have to make the mistake yourself once to henceforth be conscious of it.
I also just visited the Skytrain page and there’s a (new?) pretty Flash application over which you can mouse-over and find the time to reach the terminal stations amongst other interactive goodies. That was just excessive, wasn’t it?
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Can’t you just look to see which direction the train came from …
it’s the same as roads anyway, the skytrain on the right side will go forward, and the one on the left will go away behind you.
One of the things I noticed at the Production Way/University station (my first Skytrain station) was the lack of indication which platform was westbound and which was eastbound. I don’t know if that has since been rectified but the only way for me to know at first was to listen to the announcements (but then Columbia and Commercial sounded like the same thing to me, too).
Now, of course, I realize the nifty thing about aboveground, outdoor stations is look at the direction of traffic and other landmarks. It was confusing to a real newbie back then.