The high-speed trains in China are amazing for how many kilometers they cover (25,000km or 16,000mi), how often they run, how fast they travel (300kmph, 185mph), and how inexpensive they are to take (Suzhou to Shanghai is 100km/60mi apart and cost is just under $7).
Unlike the JR lines in Japan, which will apologize profusely if a train leaves a station 20 seconds early, the China ones don’t really seem to care about being punctual. Sure, most the time you’ll leave the station near/at the posted time of departure but lately, two out of my last three trips, they’ve been late.
Today my train is late in arriving at my departure station. I found out about the delay while looking at the big departure board in the main hall.
The board has some English on it to tell you the departure gate (technically 检票口, or “ticket check entrance”) and departure time (开点) which is very helpful. However, when your train is delayed the only information provided is in Chinese… And the text scrolls!
Scrolling text is such a bad design in so many ways. It is difficult to read and nearly impossible to translate if the text is in a language you aren’t very familiar with. Heck, the marquee tag was even removed from the HTML standards a number of years ago along with the blink tag.
It took me a while but I was finally able to write out the Chinese characters that were scrolling on the departure board to determine my train was in fact delayed: 晚点12分钟. A twelve minute delay isn’t too bad, but it is annoying when trains depart Suzhou for Shanghai every ten minutes and you just chose wrong!