English peculiarity

If you stand on a tube platform in London (or pretty much any train platform in the UK) and watch the people around you as a train comes in, you'll notice that people tend to start walking along the platform in the direction that the train is going in, almost as if they think that the train is going to overshoot the platform and they'll need to catch up to it. I'd always assumed that this is an odd psychological effect - that something in your subconscious tells you that this will improve efficiency (by moving in the direction you want eventually to be going) even though rationally you know that what matters is where you are currently standing with respect to the nearest door on the train and sometimes walking in the opposite direction would be better. But then I noticed that people don't do this in Paris - they'll just wait for the train to stop and work out which way they should go. And thinking about it, I don't remember anyone doing it in Germany or Switzerland either - or any other country that I've ever taken the train in. So what quirk of the English temperament makes us behave so strangely? I've absolutely no idea. But it's interesting at least!