The new railway announcer Heiko Grauel made his first major appearance with an announcement on the corona pandemic: since this weekend, Hesse has been heard at train stations across the country with hygiene information. “Protect yourself and others,” the 46-year-old calls out – and asks the passengers to keep the minimum distance, to wear mouth-to-nose coverings throughout the station, and to use the entire train length to get on and off. “Stay healthy,” it says at the end. A train spokesman said on Sunday: “The announcements can be heard at the first train stations as planned.” This was scheduled four times an hour.
From Monday onwards, the announcements should be heard at around 500 train stations nationwide, Deutsche Bahn had announced. These include above all the large node and metropolitan stations such as Frankfurt, Kassel, Gießen, Fulda, Bremen, Essen, Berlin, Mannheim, Nuremberg, Rosenheim and Würzburg. The announcement is part of the hygiene offensive of the railway.
Grauel from Dreieich (Offenbach district) is the new voice for automatic announcements at train stations – such as smoking bans or train entrances. Last year he spent several weeks in the recording studio for the recordings. The railways want to roll out the result gradually until it will be heard at all around 5,700 German train stations in just under three years.
At the same time, new software is being introduced that can chop up the spoken sentences and combine them into any number of new words – so they should no longer sound artificial. Grauel is a professional speaker, his voice can otherwise be heard on audio books or in television documentaries.
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