Alternative Chinese Pronunciations for Latin Alphabet Characters

[ZhuoMing]

I recently discovered that there exists alternative Chinese pronunciations for Latin letters. I realized this while waiting at a train station, when announcing the letter at the start of the train number, they don't use the English pronunciation of the letter, but rather a Chinese character to represent it. The ones I heard were T and K, which were pronounced 特 and 快 respectively. 

 

In the past, whenever I heard Chinese people read a letter, they always use the English pronunciation. This got me wondering how widely used these alternative pronunciations are. Is a random Chinese person more likely to use these pronunciations or the English pronunciations? In my case, I have only ever heard the English pronunciations from anyone outside of a train station. But this could be because I mainly talk to younger people. Are older people more likely to use the Chinese character system? Does everyone even know them all? Why does the train station use these letter pronunciations but airports use the English pronunciations? Am I just overthinking this and t and k refer to the type of train, with k representing 快 fast trains and t representing 特 especially fast trains?? 

 

I am curious if there is a resource where I can learn these Chinese pronunciations for all the letters. Searching online I can't seem to find anything about this at all! 

[歐博思]

Oh man... you'll really love how lots of natives read multiple-choice tests then:

 

A 誒

B 比

C 西

D 豬 ?

 

(edit: agreed, T and K for 特 and 快)

[889]

I'd say those train station readings are a special case. T = 特快 = 特。 K = 快速 = 快。

[Jim]

Yes, I agree with @889, in the case of the train numbers the Latin letters were in fact there to represent the different Chinese train classes so that's why they're read that way.