Thank you for the rep....
Yes, the story is real. I picked it up on Google's UK news service yesterday; it was reported in several papers but the WSJ story was most concise. I've made several visits to The UK's "National Railway Museum" in York and found that messing things up like that is not as infrequent as one might think. It once happened with London's underground system when they bought trains with more cars to deal with overcrowding. It started off OK because of the line on which they were to be used. But then they also shifted some to another line where the platforms were shorter. Result, passengers for those stations had to use the first 7 (I think was the number) of the 9 car trains as the last two would be inside the tunnel and outside the station when the train stopped.