This repository contains ScotRail announcements that were published as part of ScotRail’s publication scheme in June 2022. The original release was a single >2 hour mp3; this repo contains the same announcements split into individual files.
The announcements folder contains the announcements numbered in the order they appear in the original release. announcements-by-content contains the same files, renamed with their transcription, suffixed with the original file number. Stations also contain the three-letter station code.
See simonw’s Datasette dashboard for transcriptions and an easier way to browse and play these files. Simon’s work is based on this Google Sheet, which was crowdsourced on Twitter.
They’re also available in a Google Drive folder, which you may find easier to navigate than this repo as it’s split into subfolders of 200 files.
You can listen to these announcements set to ambient music on Ambient ScotRail Beats.
ScotRail’s copyright policy for these announcements is as follows:
Where ScotRail Trains Limited holds the copyright in its published information, the information may be copied or reproduced without formal permission, provided that:
- it is copied or reproduced accurately.
- it is not used in a misleading context, and
- the source of the material is identified.
If you find these files useful and you’re feeling spendy you can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi.
Thank you to the community on Twitter for transcribing the announcements. Here’s how it happened:
Jon Brady of the Daily Record posted a tweet with the full >2 hour recording, released in response to an FOI request. I saw a retweet by Heather Burns, thought it was fun and thought it should be easy to split it out since there was exactly 2 seconds of silence between each announcement. I found some software to do that (WavePad) and uploaded them to Google Drive since people were saying how good they’d be as music samples.
Then a couple of other people had said it’d be useful to have an index of the announcements, so I created a Google Sheet with a few columns (number, transcription, notes), did a couple of transcriptions so people would get the idea, and tweeted it out. Pretty much everything else on the sheet was done by other people who jumped on. There was no coordination or guidance, just a free-for-all.
I added a couple of bits like the progress counter and links to the mp3s on Github but all the NRE ID and Category work was done by other people. I only did about 10 transcriptions myself. The transcriptions were done in under 2 hours then people carried on adding NRE IDs and categorisations.
Thank you to everyone who took part. Unfortunately Google Sheets anonymised everyone, but if you’d like to let me know if you helped (DM me on Twitter) I’ll add a credit to you here.