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Comment by landgenoot

19 hours ago

Why are plasma displays being used? I would expect they would burn in rapidly.

Now I'm really curious if they're actually plasma.

Many of the stations were built long after LCDs became the norm (the first parts of the Thomson-East Coast Line [1] only opened in 2021), so it's likely mislabelling on the website's part.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson%E2%80%93East_Coast_Lin...

  • it also could be one of those things where in this specific context or dialect of English, plasma was generalized away from the term strictly being a technology to a generic term for that general shape and form factor.

    after all none of us have used floppies to save for over a decade or two at this point.

  • Yes, they were, back then. Back in the day when the North-South and East-West line were built (mid 80s) Conrac (today DATA MODUL) was really big in manufacturing plasma screens for airports, etc. in Germany. Pretty sure they are replaced with LCD today though.

Besides that, all those plasma screens running for >18 hours a day will be using a lot of energy, and generating a lot of heat that puts more demand on the air conditioning!

Replacing them with more modern screens would save a lot of power and money.

(I know a guy who still uses a ~20 year old plasma TV. It still looks great but it doubles as a heater in the winter time!)