“Progress is unstoppable”, so they say. This week, the nice people who run the Kintetsu train line in Osaka unveiled new digital display boards at the Tsuruhashi train station. Personally, I really like the old ones, which are the kind of “flip sign” destination boards that were all the rage at the most modern international airports in the 1960′s. You still see these signs here and there, but they’ve been supplanted over the years by more reliable (and less noisy) digital signs.

Yes, the change to digital is progress, but it seems to me to signal the end of something, too. I have fond recollections of sipping espresso at the Luxembourg airport while listening for the ratta-tat-tat of the departure board to know when there had been a change. The word “digital” has sometimes come to mean “sterile” or “impersonal”; I find the mechanical signs more interesting.

During November, the old boards and the new boards are both operating (on adjacent tracks). You can see how the new signs, though silent, emulate the old ones in terms of how information is displayed.  Form follows function, I suppose.