"Doors are closing"

[muckefuck]

Many mass transit systems have some sort of conventional announcement (either pre-recorded or recited by the conductor) that is heard when the doors to a train are closing. What ones have you heard? Here in Chicago, the message used to be, "Watch the doors, doors are closing" but when they switched to pre-recorded announcements it was shortened to

Comments

[antrazi]

I mostly hear either "Türen schliessen" German for "Doors closing" or a specific repeated signal tone that means the same.

[rheasilvia]

I usually hear "Bitte einsteigen, Türen schließen selbsttätig" (Please get on, the doors close / are closing automatically).

[anicca_anicca2]

Yep, and that's in Deutsche Bahn trains, i.e. regional and national trains. I can't remember what it used to be before that.

[lied_ohne_worte]

Yes, that is the one I was going to quote. And "selbsttätig" is really a stupid word, the more I think about it. I remember it being in school tests - "Bitte bestimmen Sie selbsttätig [XY]", and it was silly then too. It's not as if anyone else is going to do that test, after all!

[rheasilvia]

The word is unusual in modern German, but I think it makes sense in the train announcement - I'm pretty sure there are people who would start wrenching at the doors to close them otherwise.

[rebecca2525]

Yeah, that's the only one I know, too. It's the announcment on the platform of Deutsche Bahn. I never heard anything inside trains, there you usually only get a beeping noise, if anything at all.

[garonne]

Inside one particular ICE I always hear "Vorsicht beim Schließen der Türen".

I also have "Türen schließen, Vorsicht bei der Abfahrt" stuck in my head, but I'm not sure what kind of train I've heard that one in. Might even be a cross-border TGV...

[lucie_p]

I've also heard "Bitte zurückbleiben!" (which translates into "Stand back, please") without any explicit mention of closing doors.

[anicca_anicca2]

In Berlin, in local (underground and light railway) trains, it's "Einsteigen bitte" (get on the train, please), then "Zurückbleiben bitte" (stand back please). It's the same no matter if it's the conductor making the announcement or if it's the recorded message.

Quite a while back, (20 years or more) it used to be simply "EInsteigen" and "Zurückbleiben". Especially "ZU_RÜCK_BLEIM..." was often delivered in a rather military fashion, and it took the dispatchers (voc?) some getting used to before they stopped properly barking the "bitte"s or delivering them with slightly annoyed and annoying irony...

[doire]

That's reassuring; I remembered a plain "Zurückbleiben", but that would be 28 years ago.

I heard "Zurückbleiben bitte" on later visits. What/ is there any significance to the "bitte" being at the start or end of the command?

[anicca_anicca2]

No significance, at least none that I'm aware of.

[anicca_anicca2]

Also, to shatter any preconceptions about German efficiency, here (in Berlin) the simple "mind the gap" that you used to hear in London was recorded as "Bitte beachten Sie beim Aussteigen die Lücke zwischen Zug und Bahnsteigkante" :-)) Before the recorded version, there was no warning concerning gaps here.
Our English version is "mind the gap between platform and trains", if I remember right.

(And the last time I rode the London underground, they had extended their version and specified the gaps as well. Because, you know, there are so many gaps, how could anybody possibly know which one to mind...)

[rheasilvia]

I was actually quite confused by the ''mind the gap'' message when I was in London the first time! I had no clue what on earth this dangerous gap might be, because it never would have occured to me it could be necessary to warn people that the train is not melded with the platform.

(The escalators required a warning that wasn't given OTOH, as far as I was concerned... such as ''escalators might trigger fear of heights'' or some such.)

[muckefuck]

It's sort of legendary in its impenetrability to American English-speakers. We don't use the word mind in that way so hearing it for the first time is like hearing, "Horse the line!" or "Paste the green!" It's just a string of familiar words with no obvious interpretation.

[rheasilvia]

That might have been an additional factor contributing to my confusion, since I learned English by living in the US. :-) But I caught on to the "mind" quickly, while the "gap" continued to confuse me for a bit.

[iddewes]

I think that's why they now add the part 'between the train and the platform edge'. If you hear only Mind the gap now that is usually the driver saying it rather than the recording.