Visiting every Platform Zero in the UK in one day!
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- Опубліковано 2 січ 2020
- Check out Geoff's video from the same day!
• Visiting All Platform ...
This is the Geoff Marshall video about Oyster zones and four-bits.
• The First Contactless ...
My previous video with Geoff: Is the London Underground knotted?
• Is the London Undergro...
Listen to my podcast with Bec Hill: A Problem Squared
aproblemsquared.libsyn.com/
Thanks to everyone on Patreon who bought me a new lens for my camera. It's exactly the same as the old one.
/ standupmaths
List of all stations with a platform zero in the UK (as of January 2020) in the order I visited them:
CARDIFF
REDHILL
RAINHAM
GRAVESEND
LONDON KING'S CROSS
DONCASTER
STOCKPORT
EDINBURGH HAYMARKET
If you'd like a copy of Geoff’s 'Platform 0' map:
geofftech.co.uk/download/Platf...
Sorry, Think Maths have not made any teacher resources for this video, but check out their resources for all my other videos here: think-maths.co.uk/standupmaths...
CORRECTIONS
- At 18:32 I dip the non-crust end of my pizza in the garlic dipping sauce. I wanted to confess that before anyone complains. It was a long day.
- I said that Cardiff has platforms 1 through 8 and actually there is no 5. I had no idea! I only realised watching Geoff’s video.
- Let me know if you spot anything else!
Thanks as always for Jane Street being my principal sponsor.
www.janestreet.com/
Thanks to my Patreon supporters who help make these videos possible. Here is a random subset:
Nathaniel Brown
Brian Murawski
Louie Ruck
Jim Fitch
Kevin Mannon
Brandon Steed
Support my channel and I can make more maths videos:
/ standupmaths
Filming by Matt Parker and Geoff Marshall
Editing by Michelle Martin
Music by Howard Carter
Design by Simon Wright
MATT PARKER: Stand-up Mathematician
Website: standupmaths.com/
Maths book: wwwh.umble-pi.com
Nerdy maths toys: mathsgear.co.uk/ - Розваги
Geoff: "Moving sideways along the x-axis"
Matt: "Ayy thank you for translating"
The best accidental joke I've ever heard
It really was x-ellent
@@benbradley_123 y would you do that
Aaaaah.
was it accidental? Matt may have meant the pun :)
*Z* puns! They're kill me!
3:01 "I have no idea why anyone would be a train youtuber," says the mathematics comedian.
If they add new platform before zero, it is obviously going to be platform 255.
@Rich H (being even makes that obviously wrong) You mean 18446744073709551615
Anyway, in a few more years it will be platform 340282366920938463463374607431768211455
@Rich H a byte (char) will always be 1 byte long, so no, it's still 255
@Rich H Who would waste 64 bits on a platform number though? 8 bit is plenty.
@@radadadadee A byte will, but a char not necessarily. Hello from java and C# (16bit chars).
Word.
“Zero, a great number to start counting from.”
Two minutes later: *starts counting at 1*
Apparently a Parker Array starts at 1.
Many numbers are great to start from
Ends the video by counting UP to zero.
slight indexing PTSD
@@ettpunktnoll I now start array indexes at pi + i. Rational indexes are so 2019. And with two dimensional arrays a complex index is clearly the only real* option.
* pun not intended
I love the irony of posing for a picture at platform 0 at Kings Cross, when everyone else turns up to pose at the equally odd 9 and 3/4 at the same station!
Neither are odd
@@user-ef8kc4rv7n Underrated joke
Hence they're equally odd.
They were obviously too embarrassed to pose at the innumerate platform 9¾, in its location between 8 and 9. 😀
0 is even
Some people ask, "Why?"
Matt asks, "Why nought?"
or, Y₀
@@keithstathem872 Or, "Yo!"
They can't use 0 in oyster. It's reserved for 'unzoned' transport like the cable car, SE high speed and possibly the trams too. Stuff that doesn't get capped on Oyster.
Ohhh, neat.
trams use the same classification as the bus doesn't it?
You don't often see the cable car and transport in the same sentence...
I was so excited to see that Doncaster has a platform 0, since Doncaster in Australia is imfamous for having 0 railway stations.
The schematic diagram you saw with the coloured rectangles is called “CCF”. It is used nationally by railway controllers to see where each train is and its punctuality. I had the pleasure of designing and coding the much of the software for it!
David - proud of you! And mildly surprised it's visible to the public on so many stations.
"We will stop at nothing"
I see what you did there.
Bec: I've brought you onion rings, doughnuts and bagels
Matt: thanks for nothing
I should probably be annoyed that this whole adventure adds up to nothing, but it's hard to be either positive or negative about it...
Matt getting up at five in the morning.
Matt's wife: Where are you going?
Matt: To visit all the 'platform zeroes' in twenty-four hours.
Matt's wife: Okay, have fun.
Relationship goals.
Strangely enough, the time I travelled all of Melbourne's railway lines in one day from 0450 to 0005, it was before I had a wife or even a girlfriend.
Glad to see two of my favourite hobbies (and channels) collaborating!!
“I watched one of your videos recently”
“Sorry about that”
Hilarious!
I love how instantaneous that was! Geoff was ready
Is it my imagination or did i just see an almost identical post on Geoff's channel
Interstellar💥 you would be correct! Well observed
I read this comment literally exactly as those words were spoken in the video!
Matt's face when Geoff hints that he has a Platform 0 shirt for him 😂
"My train is 45 minutes late".
Meanwhile in Japan: "We're so sorry our train left 3 seconds early! We'd like to formally apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced by this, we've commenced an investigation to find the cause of the error and we are determined to prevent this from ever happening again."
(Train driver commits seppuku)
In 90's I travelled lots in Switserland and in Bern one usually checked ones clock by the train leaving not by the station clock. Swiss train paid your ticket money back if the train was late. So they were always on time even when the station clock did not agree.
15:55 "We will stop at nothing" underrated joke
What are you talking about? Nothing could be more underrated.
This is wonderful. It was pointless and time-consuming and I think the highlight of my day. I love how genuinely excited Matt is about math, and this channel has renewed my fascination with math.
Parker trip. Going from point A to A in 18 hours, going literally nowhere achieving nothing.
Waiting for Parker
Parker displacement but certainly a noble journey!
If you put a platform next to Platform 0, it underflows to Platform 255.
"It's platform Zero,
I'm holding out for a zero in the morning light,
They've got to be tough, they gotta be strong,
There has to be a train I can alight.
I need a zero".
Following elevator conventions, the one below the "0" will be "00" if digits are used
I'm sorry for the programmer that will need to handle that
00 house wins... unless you’re using a European roulette wheel which only has 0 and not 00 too.
Man, US casinos cheat!
I’ve never seen that - maybe a US thing? In my experience the floor below 0 is usually labelled...-1! Or else B1.
It's more of a screw face type thing
One of few videos I wouldn't mind the comments being turned off.
Just so we could have 0 comments.
I'm going to be the boring dude that points out you in no way get anything saying "0 comments" by doing that, what you get is "This video has comments disabled".
15:23 I'm not sure if it was intentional, but the "Thank you for translating" got me.
What a brilliant idea and non-mathematically: I can see where Sydney gets its rail heritage. The stations, architecture and signage, etc. are very much U.K. inspired from the 1850s to now.
My real question: how often does Geoff get stopped by random train staff for a chat?
69 likes
"It wasn't on the body, the expensive bit" - *Videographers chuckle*
The ‘Circle’ line... very on-brand, well done!
I’m sure Gary Brannan would enjoy this video! It’s got trains in it!
Just think, this video wouldn’t exist without ones and zero’s, that’s how important zero is!
Good sentiment, bad pluralisation of zero.
("Zeros" and "zeroes" are often both correct, consult your style guide.)
Matt:"I have no idea why anyone would be a train youtuber"
Me : how many videos of standupmaths have train in them?
After 0 they'll probably go to 00 like in roulette and wire gauges.
0, 00 and 000 are also model railway scales (7mm, 4mm and 2mm respectively).
In France, negative platforms use letters.
Ah! Hexidecimal.
Trains late, trains cancelled, packed trains...
This is what i call a Parker Trip.
This is your funniest video yet! Love it.
I know I am a late commentator but it has to be said 09:00 when Geoff presents the early Christmas gift shirt, Matts response is everything! The sheer gratitude. Love it!
Trains and Maths!!! I love when you two meet up and do videos together.
Sheldon Cooper was here
@@shambosaha9727 He was more physics than Maths, if I remember correctly.
@@toast99bubbles Of course, but he was fond of both maths and trains.
45 minutes late in Britain.
Always on time in Japan.
But in the U.S.?
Can't be late if you don't provide service.
amtrak be like "well actually" and proceeds to constantly be late on the like 6 routes it does offer
I took Amtrak from New York to North Carolina and arrived 5 hours late.
They redefined late here in Sydney, and then said 'look! Trains are running closer to the timetable now, yay!''
@@caffeineau I think we can give them a pass for "the track and surrounding area is currently on fire".
I love how you start out at Cardiff and tell me something I never knew about my nearest big station.
In The Netherlands, the platforms aren't numbered, but rather the tracks they're on. Especially on larger stations, it's not unusual to see some numbers being skipped, since they correspond to platformless tracks. An example is Weesp (www.ns.nl/stationsinformatie/wp/weesp), that has platforms for tracks 1 and 2, and for 5 and 6. Tracks 3 and 4 are used for passing express trains.
Hi Matt yesterday I received humble pi as Christmas gift and Im really enjoying it, it's awesome 💯
The use of 0 as zone number, may have been 'removed' for programming reasons, like meta-number or such.
I was thinking that too. There may be code embedded in the readers (or the tallying system) that takes zone=0 as a wildcard or a special flag or something, and now it's buried and it would be too hard to dig out (at least for the moment).
4 bits (with a total number space of 0 through 15) for a number that you plan to only have 6 conceivable possible valid combinations isn't actually that bad. When you set a format like that you generally try to at least have a factor of 2 margin, and they achieved that. But then someone got clever about zone codes and thought only in the short term, and then they ran out.
I'd guess it could be a private testing zone for debugging software, or an "uninitialized" value.
It's a Y2K-style problem, all over again.
I was thinking a lot simpler, bad coding resulting in a null error, or a staff/override code
Aye -- sometimes you need a special value for something.
this has such a wealth of sleep-deprived comedy
17:08
"I watched one of your videos recently"
"sorry about that"
Well done mate. Geoff will have to finish his next year.
The content I didn't know I needed.
a small town near mine has a small train station that beats it all. when you come in from the east, you're directly on platform 2, which goes north. you can go down a tunnel to platforms 1 and 3, which share an "island" and both go south. and here's the really weird one: there's a branch from the northbound track a bit further south that has the number 6. it gets used maybe once a month for passengers (if an out-of schedule freight train needs to pass). there are also a couple of extra storage tracks, which seem rather unused.
overall, a train enthusiast's dream.
You are so cool, thank you for sharing your amazing journey. God bless you and your family
You’re the #0. Being a train youtuber who loves both your channels, I’m so happy this video exists :-)
"thanks for nothing" is such a good response lmao
'Naughty' of the train companies to possibly delay the venture.
I love how at the same time, you ended up visiting all three capitals of mainland Britain: Cardiff, London and finally Edinburgh.
Best video of 2020!
20:04 "We could be zeros just for one day."
Best joke in the video. :D
"I have no idea why anyone would be a train youtuber"
Jay Foreman shade
It wasn't Jay shade but foreshadowing to Geoff.
Hi Matt, I'm loving the video. I'm also going to be visiting every Platform 0 in the UK as a part of my Mysteries of the British Railway series. They've recently opened up a Platform 0 in Leeds (and it splits too), so that should be exciting to see. Keep up the excellent work, and have a wonderful Christmas and a prosperous 2022
I saw some people running towards Platform 0 in Leeds loudly cursing that it was a stupid place to put it. I'm not sure where they expected other than next to 1.
"Can you have minus numbers in software code?"
"Yeah!"
... Matt confidently says about code that was probably last touched in ca. 1994. 😆
"Zero is a perfectly good number and if you ignore that you're peril"
*"The problem is that it's a dangerous number and a lot of things can go horribly wrong with zero"*
Mmmm, classic Numberphile reference
It's all fun and games until someone divides by a black hole.
one day they will need platform -1.
The train service provided by Northern Rail is purely imaginary. ..
So only GWR is real?
They're kinda irrational.
Northern* They haven't been northern rail since 2016. Wasn't Northern Rail's fault. It was the EU's fault, specifically Spain, which still never delivered the new trains it ordered years ago.
@@carbon1255 Good chip-in. There's the story behind it.
‘Thank you for translating’ (15:25) got an actual groan out of me. Kudos!
Oh wait? A collab with Geoff again?
HELL YEAH!
15:54 "We will stop at _nothing_"
I see what you did there ;)
Damn, beaten to it by the video :( 19:48
"Happy zero day!" Usually a zero day isn't happy. XD
This is the perfect video. Math UA-cam and train UA-cam combined = greatness.
Cannot believe Hooton Station gets mentioned 😂 the only other time I've ever seen my local(ish) Station mentioned is by Bill Bryson when he said "Hooton offered the world not only a mildly ridiculous name, but the dumpiest British Rail station I ever hope to sneeze in."
"We're going to stop at nothing!"
"Can you have minus numbers in software coding?"
That 100% depends on the code and what the coder anticipated. If they tried it whoever had to first compile the thing afterward would be fully clenched.
also depends on how things are encoded. if for some reason they did `platformNum="1"` vs `platformNum=1` ... a string vs an int is a big difference (also depending on language lol)
@@pvic6959, I don't see why they would've used strings.
First of all, the control system is probably coded in C (often legacy systems of this sort are), which doesn't have great support for strings. Strings are stored as a character array and cause all sorts of problems, so C coders tend to avoid them when possible.
The big question was whether or not they used signed integers. Unsigned integers cannot store negative numbers, but can have a maximum value (about) two times larger than than the maximum value of a signed integer. You can actually get the maximum value of a signed integer by subtracting 1 from zero (or casting -1).
Signed numbers, on the other hand, are often stored in 2s compliment form. While they can hold the same amount of numbers as their unsigned counterpart, those numbers are spread out (almost) evenly among the positive and negative numbers.
I think it is likely the coders used 4 bit integers to save memory. This would allow 16 platforms per station, but only if they used unsigned values, so platform 0 is perfectly legal, but -1 isn't.
Or there could be an array that is indexed by the platform number. While C allows arrays to be indexed when negative numbers, this behavior is undefined and could lead to the system crashing. This would of course be undesirable for public transportation infustructure.
@@TheRavenCoder
TheOneIsMemeMe I agree, but people do silly things all the time. My friend was telling me about a but at his work (we're both software engineers) because someone used the string "null" instead of the keyword lol.
but yes, the architecture used is the most important. I'd thought about it but didnt want to get into the explanation like you did lol. have a like for your troubles :) I'd forgotten the details and others can learn from you comment too!
@@TheRavenCoder would waterloo having 25 platforms only need to change _their_ way of coding the numbers or would that force all the other stations to use 5 bits?
@@ilexdiapason Possibly. I'm not in England, not have I ever been so I'm not sure on all the details of how many platforms each station has. I chose 4 because it's a nice power of 2 and computer systems like powers of 2s. If they allocated more bits it'd probably be 8, not 5, at which point using unsigned integers would be kind of silly (8 bit signed numbers can range from -128 to 127, far more platforms than any station would have). Because unsigned numbers can create arithmetic problems, most coders would prefer using signed numbers in this case.
However if memory was too tight to allow 8 bits and they saw a need for more than 16 platforms, they could have used 5 bits, which would have allowed for 32 platforms.
If the software architects didn't forsee a station with more than 16 platforms, such a station could just have 2 separate systems that the trains see as two separate stations.
The truth is without more knowledge of the underlying system, this is all just speculation. Who knows, the system might be able to handle a platform -1 fine but the stations don't want it for various other less technical reasons.
And to answer the original question, if one station upgraded their system to use more bits, it's likely all stations would need to do so (due to the interconnectivity such systems need)
like ten years ago I discovered the magic of math youtubers
and now I'm discovering the magic of train youtubers
Great job
"We will stop at nothing!"
Destination: Platform Zero
Me - a german - sees a "DB" (Deutsche Bundesbahn) train, and Matt immediately points at it: "That's the train that broke down."
Why am i not surprised.
Well actualy it was a DB locomotive pulling a London North Eastern Railway Train, which is owned by the british government.
I think it is only called Deutsche Bahn :)
Bundesbahn gibt's in der Schweiz
@@mandelbrot91 It used to be Bundesbahn until the fusion with the east German Reichsbahn in 94.
@@kedrak90 ahh okay. I was Born in '91 - that will explain
It was a DB Cargo locomotive. And I assume it was used to pull the broken down train.
Whenever you have a storage location in a computer it always has a value. The problem using zero in an automated system is that when things go wrong, values are not initialized properly, devices fail, storage locations sometimes improperly go to zero. That could be a reason for avoiding zeros as being a valid number to use. Of course with 4 bits 15 is also a potential problem. Great video.
I've dropped the exact same lens, and it wasn't too hard to fix it. Just take out a few screws on the back, pop the innards back into their tracks, put it back together, and it's served me a couple more years with no issues.
Singing - "Zero my hero, how wonderful you are" Schoolhouse Rock taught me to appreciate zero 30 years ago!
Why does this feel like a Geoff Marshall video...
Geoff Marshall shows up
It would be really satisfying for stations to use complex numbers for platforms on different levels
Another interesting fact about Cardiff Central is that, although there is a sign for platform 5, it not longer exists as it was a platform for terminating trains only and sat between platforms 3 and 4 I believe. At some point, they decided they didn't need it anymore and so filled it in but left all the signs for it.
if you're going to eat pizza on a voyage to find zero, you should have had a none pizza with left beef
"Available now, via a convoluted RSS feed" 😆
I love me some convoluted RSS feeds!
Oyster cards: I’d guess that 0 is a special case for an unused location on the card? So it saves having an extra flag bit to say “this entry is not used”, but does also mean you can’t use zero as a zone number because then you can’t tell the difference between an unused entry and the extra zone. Also a blank card probably starts life with all data on the smart card as zero, so therefore all entries automatically flagged as “unused” by default.
1:47 Two practical reasons for not renumbering the rest of the platforms:
0: all the station signage needs to be changed
1: the signaling software needs to be re-written to update the platform numbers on the screens in the signal boxes, on the platforms, and the illuminated numbers over some signals
2: the "diagrams" showing what train goes where all need to be changed
Given those reasons, it's more straightforward to slip in a platform zero.
"You gotta dump that hero, and get yourself a zero!"
want to know a really shocking fact:
in the Netherlands the is a town called Nijmegen the trainstation there counts the rails in a bit of a weird order.
it starts with 35 then 1 3 and then 4
What??? The maniacs! They shouldn't be allowed to get away with that kind of thing.
Geoff marshall is a legend
Liverpool Lime Street now has a 'Platform Zero' Since it's recent modifications
I need a zero! I'm holding out for a zero until the end of the day.
I never realised this was weird. I'm from Redhill and just never thought about it.
Leon Freeman - I’m in Reigate and still awaiting the need to use platform 0!
@@MrGreatplumreally I've ended up at platform 0 quite a lot from reigate
Leon Freeman - I think I need to get the train more!
this video made me all to happy.
Now we need a video on year zero.
It’s good you didn’t choose to visit all platforms with the smallest prime number
One of my uni professors said the first day of class "if you consider zero a natural number please leave"
I would have left very proudly
In Belgium 0 is a natural number. You can count 0.
I feel like UK youtubers have been collabing a lot more lately and I feel like we're in the endgame now
There are indeed many unsung Zeros out there...
Leeds actually has an unfinished platform 0.
You just know that if they introduce a "Platform -1", some piece of software is going to interpret it as Platform "true" and cause a horrific accident. Someone should write a book about stuff like that.
Dom but platforms 1and up are also « true » in a Boolean test
I think the most likely thing is them using an unsigned int so it will underflow to - 1
That might cause an issue if for some reason the software uses different sized ints in different places. There's basically no chance of anything going wrong unless an underflow happens in that case (no station will have thousands of platforms) so that sort of bug may exist, whereas other bugs would have been caught and fixed long ago.
"Platform -1" sounds like the title of Matt's next book
@Blan Morrison That's a great name. Surprised nobody has thought of that already!
I broke the exact same camera lense in the same way. Well done 👍
What a crossover!
I'd like to ask, was there hamiltonian path between all platform zeros?
I would assume that zone 0 is considered invalid or unset and that's why it's not used
Absolutely, zero is used as an initialiser and signifies empty or unset. Also known as null, and the binary representation of false, it's a good value to reserve as an obvious error or invalid state. And while I understand the embedded system restrictions of oyster and commend the data saving efforts of TFL with using 4 bits for zones (I've bitpacked many structures in the past and still need to now!), it doesn't seem forward thinking..
Geoff, yay, that hilarious as I follow him and I saw his first
Now i know why my train in GER is late(16:11): Rescueing stranded trains in GB by the DB(Deutsche Bahn)... Seems we all have our share of problems with the railway system^^ Great Collab between you two in search for the special in the ordinary, Greetings from Lübeck and keep on rockin' \o/