My favourites are the Halts (a halt is naturally smaller than an actual stop.) Halts are often By Request only, a fact that may dismay you, if you:
A.) do not hold obscure local knowledge about the precise local distinction of which villages and hamlets are Halts and which are Stations, or
B.) arenāt familiar enough with colloquial British English to understand that when an elderly muppet doing a comedy voice quacks incoherently in an inhuman cadence into an underwater speaker at the other end of a bus carriage full of people shouting slowly and sweatily about football, THAT was actually vital information and you needed to hear it precisely and parse it perfectly - since that single incidence of quacking was the only briefing you were going to get about the situation re: this particular Halt, or
C.) you donāt have The App (each train line has its own app. Each train line is specific to a region. Many are silent on the etiquette of halts) or
D.) the PA system in the train was broken anyway (they usually are) so you had no chance of hearing any quacking muppet announcements even if the madman in charge of the train that day felt like making any.
On a route I travel sometimes there is a Halt By Request Only, Passengers For This Halt Must Inform The Conductor Of Their Request and Move To the Front Door of The Front Carriage Only As No Other Doors Open At This Halt. This is because the Halt has a small doormat-sized platform onto which you are catapulted, and if you do not land precisely on this platform youād be shot into the river. If you donāt negotiate properly and if you havenāt figured out where to stand, TOO BAD.
If you are at the Halt hoping to catch the train , you are expected to flag it down like a bus. Hope and courage are required. It does Not always work.
The Halt is Picturesque and not far from a station, so you can get off at the halt and enjoy many pleasant scenic walks into the town at the station, where you can eat a nice lunch and get back on a train. (Or vice versa, disembark at the station and be collected at the halt.) this would be a delightful thing to do on a visit and is recommended to visitors, who are expected to understand how this Halt operates through osmosis.
Iāve seen many sad and bewildered visitors be unwillingly shunted into a city they had no intention of visiting, after assuming that a train stop they intended and requested on the map/app/ticket was an actual train stop, and not an arcane and elaborate masquerade, a train stop by previous arrangement only
yousharknotpass
theartofmadeline
titsay
turnnoffyourmind
dededos
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