The new legible departures board at Victoria station

VICTORIA station has a new spotless departures board and everything is perfectly legible. What a shame!

Readers will already know that these pages celebrate some of the things we didn’t know we’d miss now they are gone, and can I please nominate this week clickety clackety signs?

It’s rare to see a “split-flap” display – or Solari boards, to use the trade name – at train stations and airports any more. They are museum pieces.

You’re more likely to see a split-flap clock in a trendy kitchen

But their relentless tap was once part of the atmosphere of a busy terminal. Flap-flip-flap, and you felt like you could be anywhere by midnight: Los Angeles, Cairo, Helsinki or Hayward’s Heath.

Lamentably, perhaps only to Harrington, Victoria hasn’t used one since 2004 but therefore can no longer be considered, in my opinion, for the start of a race-against-time detective story or a serendipitous romance novel.

Instead the clickety-clacks are destined for retirement in middle-class kitchens up and down the land, where knowing use of old station clocks and split flaps ticking over the time and date are now an ideal home must-have.