Make your own station announcements

[The Evil Bus Driver]

I've put this in here as it involves electronics stuff. Mods please move it if there's somewhere better

 

Looking back through an old Hornby catalogue they used to do a station announcement recorder, basically consisting of a tape recorder you could record onto and put inside their booking hall kit. It was pretty crude and with a bit of knowhow and an Iphonecdpeaker or even Bluetooth you could probably achieve better results.

 

Like using the full ATOS Anne files used on the National network. Now I know she sounds like a bit of a moody madam, but I do understand she's automated. 

 

There's even somewhere you can make up your own, great for if you model somewhere on the actual network. Text Speak also produces a pretty good sounding vocalisation for those of us who model fictitious locations and with a bit of reverb and maybe a couple of other modifications it could sound like someone with a microphone. (Like the bloke who sounded like Boycie at Milton Keynes a fair while ago. All together now: The-ah next-ah train-ah...  seriously!)

I might make a soundboard for mine

 

Here's a link, it's strangely fascinating

Make your own announcements

[Kylestrome]

Oh, what fun!

 

I just made up an announcement for a West Highland train from Glasgow to Mallaig, which involves an awful lot of scrolling to enter the intermediate stations. 🤪

 

It doesn't quite have the 'ring' of a seventies live announcement, though.

 

David

[The Evil Bus Driver]

It appears that the use of the files on that site are subject to a cease and desist so they've been taken off.  You might be able to use Text to Speech which has come on a fair amount but you do have to write it phonetically so you're spelling it how you want it to sound. Add a bit of reverb and you've got a space like a station concourse for it to sound like it's bouncing around. Just stick a Bluetooth speaker under the board and you've got something that'll sound great. 

Edited October 9, 2023 by The Evil Bus Driver

[MossdaleNGauge]

Try this site for the clips to put together to make a complete message, and there are some very unusual ones there for ScotRail to play

 

https://scotrail.fishcreek.dev/?s=09

[wombatofludham]

I've used Acapella Box to do voice overs for the "Pendeford Yard" videos, using Audacity to live record the readback.  There is one voice that sounds remarkably like the late Phil Sayer whose voice was used a lot on stations until recently.  I did do some trial announcements for the layout when I was building "Wednesford" v1 and v2 which had a station and loaded them onto a disused mobile smartphone connected to a Bluetooth speaker, setting the announcements up as a playlist so I could trigger them in sequence.

If you look up "Pendeford Yard" videos on YouTube you can hear how good text to speech readers are and how easy it is to work with the soundfiles once recorded onto Audacity.

[Michael Hodgson]

On 01/08/2023 at 20:25, Kylestrome said:

Oh, what fun!

 

I just made up an announcement for a West Highland train from Glasgow to Mallaig, which involves an awful lot of scrolling to enter the intermediate stations. 🤪

 

It doesn't quite have the 'ring' of a seventies live announcement, though.

 

David

Yes, as a regular commuter at Kings cross in the 1970s I remember station announcements of the Aberdeen train calling at "... Burntiz-land, Kirk-coll-dee, ..." 😅

[5BarVT]

Likewise one at Paddington for a special going to Pont-are-dew-lace.

:-)

Paul.