Crossrail? More like Borkrail...

A thoroughly modern piece of public transport infrastructure deserves a thoroughly modern bork

Bork!Bork!Bork! London's Elizabeth Line is the latest thing in urban development (at least as far as the UK is concerned). So it seems appropriate that its borks should be similarly up to date, and its emoticons rotated so the intent cannot be mistaken.

Sent in by an eagle-eyed Register reader, today's entry in the pantheon of bork was snapped at London's Paddington station, where a passenger can enjoy the delights of the UK's national rail network, as well as take a trip on a variety of London underground lines (aka the "Tube") including the District, Metropolitan, and the increasingly inaccurately named Circle.

And no, the Elizabeth Line is in town, taking visitors from East to West and back again on trains with astonishingly uncomfortable seats and a bladder-bursting lack of toilet facilities.

And, it appears, some very unhappy information screens.

By our reckoning, that looks like a recent Windows 10 blue-screen-of-death, where Microsoft has attempted to hide what has befallen the device in question behind a sad emoticon and the friendly text "Your PC ran into a problem."

Elizabeth line information screen BSOD - Click to enlarge

Something running into something else is never a thing a passenger wants to see on public transport, and we suspect that something has gone badly wrong behind the scenes. The stop code IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL usually happens when a process stomps over memory to which it should have access. Windows responds to such antics in time-honored fashion… by halting abruptly with a stop error.

However, look a little closer, and it seems there might be something more to this error. Aside from the fact that the user is being directed to http://windows.com/stopcode rather than something starting with https, several characters have been replaced with blocks, suggesting that a video driver or some video hardware is playing up.

Our reader, a former Vulture, didn't hang around to find out what happened if and when that percentage counter reached 100. After all, it takes a very special kind of nerd to hang around a station watching borked information signs.

However, we were saddened to see that for London's Elizabeth Line at least, that that cockroach of public transport, Windows 2000, appears to have been squashed once and for all. Had it endured a little longer, we're sure that the old thing would have kept on running or spared customers a cutesy emoticon where a hard-core technical error really belongs. ®