hOn some trains there are little hammers with sharp titanium heads intended to smash the window during the next derailment. I’ve never had the chance to use one, but I have often been tempted to wrest a hammer from its nest and set about the loudspeaker that has just woken me up by a crackling voice shouting: “If you see something that doesn’t look right… See it. Say it. Sorted.”

I see many things that don’t look right: the rejected chips bathing in ketchup in one half of an abandoned burger box; an empty bottle that rolls up and down the carriage floor in a demonstration of Newtonian momentum; a damp patch on the seat I was about to take. Sometimes I might be driven to say it: “This is disgusting.” But it doesn’t help.

The real reason that “See it. Say it. Sorted” is so annoying is that it is not idiomatic English. “Sorted” is the only bit that is idiomatic, and it is not my idiom, gentle reader, nor, I suspect yours. It is the idiom of a character on EastEnders yelling: “Sort it! End of!”

It is a relief to enter Welsh rail-space and hear pointless announcements in the ancient and incomprehensible language of that land. They sound lovely. And, since our safety is the rail operators’ priority, I bet they make terrorists who have done their Welsh homework think twice before committing some atrocity.

Wales is not, I think, covered by the eye-catching initiative by Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, of a “bonfire of the banalities” in the train announcer’s repertoire. I hadn’t realised that the Department of Transport was responsible for all such annoyances, but we’ll know next time.

There is no need for them to be so infuriating. After all, there is one stock announcement that passengers (sorry “customers”) have taken to their hearts: “Mind the gap.” That is partly because it has in the past been pronounced in a rich and echoing way, at least at Bank station on the London Underground, where the proudly curving track produces wonderfully wide and uneven voids between the platform edge and the train door which look as though they could benefit from a rope bridge woven from lianas.

“Mind the gap,” is undoubtedly idiomatic. Americans find it cute because they don’t “mind” things in that sense. The Spaniards verbosely, prefer to announce Atención: estación en curva. Al salir, tengan cuidado para no introducir el pie entre coche y andén – “Attention! Station on a bend. On leaving, take care not to introduce the foot between the coach and the platform.” Wise words, if too late by the time the advice has been delivered.

Why can’t all rail announcements be in proper English like “Mind the gap”? Do the people who come up with them go to a special language school to learn Officialese by the immersive method?

We are told that a train is “arriving into” Leamington Spa. It should obviously be “arriving at” that agreeable watering place. We hear that Bicester North is the next “station stop”. That is a mad piece of pedantry. Obviously we might be rushing through Princes Risborough, a station that is not a stop on this journey, but station comes from Latin statio, the place where something stands or stays. So station will do very nicely on its own, thank you.

In a spirit of magnanimity I admit that it is handy to have a dot matrix at the end of the carriage with the names of coming stations repeatedly chugging by. That is gratefully silent, and it is hard for the management to smuggle Officialese into a list of old English place names.

But the same dot matrix is essential to a really unnerving piece of passenger disservice. When the train is due to divide, it tells you to travel in the first six carriages, say, for the station you want. But then an erroneously recorded voice says: “This is an eight-carriage train. This is carriage [pause] nine.”