Hills of the North - The Last Great Project

[LNER4479]

I did once apply for a job as an Area Rolling Stock Engineer.

 

Didn't get it.

 

I was a Depot Mr RAVERS for a while though!

(for those not in on this: RAil VEhicle Records System, so not a perfect mnemonic)

[Metropolitan H]

I was the ARSE on LU - that is "Assistant Rolling Stock Engineer" - and had it on the back of my Hi-Vi vest. Then I became a dyslexic acronym as "Asset Engineer Rolling Stock" within Metronet for a number of years before retiring from fulltime work. The retirement job title was "Subject Engineer Heritage Trains" for a few years - I never could find the acronym, but it was fun being paid to play with a big train set, including a certain 0-4-4T and Bo-Bo No.12 "Sarah Siddons".

 

Regards

CH

 

 

Edited July 23, 2023 by Metropolitan H
correction of unspecific terms.

[Fishplate]

23 hours ago, LNER4479 said:

BR just seemed particularly good at it ...

 

Living where both Northern and Transpennine are now part of the 'Operator of Last Resort' (ie nationalised) I witnessed a person on a Northern service being ticked off for being on there with a TP ticket. The train she wanted to catch was cancelled. The T P train was going to where she wanted to go a few minutes later. She was told she should have waited an hour for the next Northern train , despite the train we were on being less than half full.

 

I don't remember catching the next available train as an offence in BR days? No wonder the public prefer the car when this sort of 'customer service ' on a privatised railway prevails.

[St Enodoc]

1 hour ago, Fishplate said:

 

Living where both Northern and Transpennine are now part of the 'Operator of Last Resort' (ie nationalised) I witnessed a person on a Northern service being ticked off for being on there with a TP ticket. The train she wanted to catch was cancelled. The T P train was going to where she wanted to go a few minutes later. She was told she should have waited an hour for the next Northern train , despite the train we were on being less than half full.

 

I don't remember catching the next available train as an offence in BR days? No wonder the public prefer the car when this sort of 'customer service ' on a privatised railway prevails.

Putting this into a local (for me) context, if my Qantas flight from Sydney to Melbourne is cancelled, can I just pop round to the Virgin desk and check in for their next flight or do I have to wait for the next Qantas flight? Why should train services operated by different companies be different?

 

Don't put up arguments about whether they should be separate companies or not - that's a different question for another time and place.

[Fishplate]

28 minutes ago, St Enodoc said:

Putting this into a local (for me) context, if my Qantas flight from Sydney to Melbourne is cancelled, can I just pop round to the Virgin desk and check in for their next flight or do I have to wait for the next Qantas flight? Why should train services operated by different companies be different?

 

Don't put up arguments about whether they should be separate companies or not - that's a different question for another time and place.

 

Sorry if I wasn't clear. Transpennine and Northern are now run by the government/ Dft so are the same operator. Therefore logic would suggest the public would have the benefit of common ticketing on trains run by the same operator.

 

Agree with your comment on different operators. 

[Tortuga]

I didn’t know Northern and Transpennine issued their own tickets for their own services. I thought a ticket issued by the machine was valid for the journey you wished to make via any permitted route, regardless of which train operator’s service you travel on?

 

EDIT: I should make it clear that I was thinking of local stopping services rather than long distance ones when I wrote this. I used to use both Northern and Transpennine services to travel into and out of Leeds: arrive at station, buy ticket and get on whichever service arrived first. Obviously, if I was going to travel between, say Leeds and London, I would book a ticket that allowed me to travel on a single service run by one operator (like using a plane)

Edited July 23, 2023 by Tortuga
Clarity

[30368]

22 hours ago, Wheatley said:

I'm convinced BR had a department just to think up daft names, or at least, the practice of thinking up slightly rude or funny ones was embedded in the culture. Apart from OfQ they already had LOVERS and RAVERS for the locomotive and rolling stock vehicle records systems, which meant you could legitimately require applicants to be "conversant with LOVERS and RAVERS"  when writing job adverts.

 

You are correct Sir!

 

I am very, very amused by this post.

Whilst I did not come up with these very suggestive monikers* I was one of the principle designers/specifiers of RAVERS together with my team and the system was coded in the Computing Centre at Darlington. We were the future!

RAVERS, and its foundation system RSL (Rolling Stock Library) were discussed at great legnth, by many potential purchasers (and their team of lawyers and advisors and insurers) at some very large meetings in very expensive London Venues, I attended too. It was, to say the least, amusing to listen to these very expensive looking lawyers blathering on about things... "was it essential to use RAVERS" and could LOVERS talk to RAVERS ? was it cheaper to be a LOVER than a RAVER? Sorry made the last one up. You get the drift. I had to keep a strait face since I was advising on behalf of the BRB. 

I never thought such subjects would emerge from the depths of 1980/90's BRB history...and I was there!

 

* But I know who did and I will never reveal his name.

 

Kind regards, a very chuckling,

 

Richard B

 

Edited July 23, 2023 by 30368

[St Enodoc]

10 minutes ago, 30368 said:

* But I know who did and I will never reveal his name.

I don't know but I would guess that his first name began with R. Am I getting warm?

[30368]

18 minutes ago, St Enodoc said:

I don't know but I would guess that his first name began with R. Am I getting warm?

 

Plenty of scope with one letter.....

 

The project had very LNER/ER origins, P2 was very popular.

 

Kind regards,

 

Richard B

[The Stationmaster]

3 hours ago, 30368 said:

 

Plenty of scope with one letter.....

 

The project had very LNER/ER origins, P2 was very popular.

 

Kind regards,

 

Richard B

P2 was an excellent program for its day (and probably even better now if it still exists).    That development office I recall from one visit there had some very LNER?ER?NER inclined screen savers on at leats one desk top machine.

[30368]

19 hours ago, LNER4479 said:

I was a Depot Mr RAVERS for a while though!

 

So 4479, did you enjoy being a depot Mr RAVERS? May I ask which depot?

You must have had dealings with former colleagues of mine whom were in the Implementation Team? To add to the nostalgia, did you use the PC based GUI? You must have had dealings with the lovely ladies and gents in my Help Desk Teams at Derby?

 

I enjoyed my time with the project but was pleased, in the end, to move on to other railway things.

 

Kind regards,

 

Richard B

 

[LNER4479]

Hi Richard,

 

My apologies, as your post above is from nearly a week ago.

 

The depot concerned was Longsight depot (Manchester). Despite what you might think, by far the biggest concentration of vehicles there was coaching stock (mainly Mk2DEF), rather than locomotives. I distinctly recall trying to grapple with setting up the parent-child links within RAVERS for the major components; in the case of a coach, this was wheelsets / bogies and (I think?) the MA set. Problem was, Mk2 bogies (BT42) had no unique identifiers on them so we were instructed to affix ID plates with a unique number stamped on. Such a list was duly supplied from Derby.

 

Problem was, in the continuous cycle of coaches going off to works and having other unscheduled bogie swaps, you were running to stand still trying to keep track of all the newly applied bogie numbers within RAVERS. My recollection is that we never really got on top of it.

 

Wheelset numbers in the system were important for keeping track of UAT details. I arrived not long after the Longsight wheel lathe was commissioned (across the tracks on the site of the old Freightliner depot) and the guys there did the UAT on anything that went through the lathe so there was an ongoing battle to keep on top of that info. That was something of a priority for obvious reasons.

 

I seem to recall going to a couple of RAVERS user group meetings at Derby and heard of other depots wrestling with the challenge of keeping the HST oil sampling records up to date in RAVERS ... but that was something I never got involved in.

 

I may have had the odd call or two with the RAVERS helpdesk but can't say as I recall any names (sorry!) I remember hearing about the GUI thingy and saw a demonstration of picking up a component and attaching it to a vehicle (with something called a 'mouse'). Looked great ... but I don't think the computers we had at the depot were that advanced - we were still using the old (Apollo?) mainframe computers at the time!

 

Overall (as you can perhaps tell?), I was a little underwhelmed with the system although I could see its potential (sorry again!)

Edited July 29, 2023 by LNER4479

[30368]

16 hours ago, LNER4479 said:

Overall (as you can perhaps tell?), I was a little underwhelmed with the system although I could see its potential (sorry again!)

 

How lovely to hear again all the difficulties that we struggled with back in the 1980/90s! All that you have said rings so many bells. Longsight was a depot I knew very little.

 

I'm afraid I was responsible for the component structure in RAVERS we had to have something that related type to type to ensure that only the correct type of component could be "fitted" and then specify a range of real serial numbers for each (valid) component type. The trouble was there was some variation nationally on how we described a given type of, say, traction motor. Worse still, we had no real idea of the range of valid serial numbers that applied to any given type of component. All this was to avoid, a silly example I know, of someone fitting a Sulzer 6LDA engine to class 25 bogie (They were probably all scrapped by the 1990's??). If you could, someone would.

 

Sorry I have probably confused you even more, please don't have any RAVERS nightmares!

 

Really great to hear from you - happy model railways!

 

Kind regards,

 

Richard B

[BWsTrains]

On 23/07/2023 at 03:23, Wheatley said:

which meant you could legitimately require applicants to be "conversant with LOVERS and RAVERS"  when writing job adverts.

 

May be so, but if you went to Imperial College to study Chemistry you graduated as an Associate of the Royal School of Chemistry and then if staying on for a PhD you also scored also a Diploma of Imperial College making you an ARSC and a DIC. Try putting those on a CV 🤣

 

I quit IC while I was still marginally ahead with just the first gong.

 

Edited July 29, 2023 by BWsTrains

[LNER4479]

Well, I got good news and I got bad news ...

 

Firstly the good news - the tracks are back down at Central plats 3 & 4.

 

 

And now the bad news:

 

The station throat is now in a state of partial dismantlement! The single slip I installed when Central was first rebuilt really needs to be a double slip so here they are - single slip removed and replacement double slip alongside. The exact rationale for this will become apparent in due course.

 

All part of trying to get things right now to avoid more painful alterations later on😉

 

Edited August 6, 2023 by LNER4479

[lezz01]

Oh well at least you hadn't ballasted it eh?!

Regards Lez.

[LNER4479]

And now possibly the most boring photo that will ever be posted on this thread:

 

The main board for Upperby is making used on a 4 x 3 piece of 24mm ply. Yes you did read that right. The far corner (where the furthest roundhouse roads will be) will not be reachable in a conventional manner so this board will have to take my weight for installation purposes at least. It's sitting on battens securely affixed to the wall panelling plus these stout (4 x 2) timber legs. The one in the middle being illuminated (do you like the spot lamp?) was installed yesterday and packed to get the board dead level.

 

I'm told that the walls need painting (white) so this solid construction is also coming in useful to achieve that aim. Won't be so easy once the shed is set out.

 

Edited August 6, 2023 by LNER4479

[BMacdermott]

Presumably, that is a Brush Type 2 you are using.🙂

 

Brian

[LNER4479]

Well, it's certainly the closest one of those is ever going to get to the layout 🙄

[BMacdermott]

It's all very hard work but amazing how you are bringing it all together!👍

 

Brian

[LNER4479]

Well, didn't take long to reinstate the station throat:

 

 

Just as well, 'cos:

 

A northbound goods train sets off from Dentonholme.

 

Crossing over to Caledonian metals at Caldew junctions. This is another out-of-the-box loco that runs beautifully; should see plenty of use.

 

Slightly unusual viewpoint as the train approaches Bog Junc. Gives you an idea of how it's set out.

 

Meanwhile a southbound goods sets off from Central over the reinstated pointwork.

 

You just knew I was going to do that?

 

Taking the Caley metals at Grand Junc

 

And thus arrives into Dentonholme. It's all still working 😉

Edited August 8, 2023 by LNER4479

[Enterprisingwestern]

On 06/08/2023 at 16:54, BMacdermott said:

Presumably, that is a Brush Type 2 you are using.🙂

 

Brian

 

Presumably from Bristle Bath Road shed?

 

Mike.

[St Enodoc]

On 06/08/2023 at 08:57, LNER4479 said:

The exact rationale for this will become apparent in due course.

 

All part of trying to get things right now to avoid more painful alterations later on😉

Nobody else seems to have bitten, so...

 

Something to do with direct access between all of the fiddle yard roads and all of the running lines?

[LNER4479]

On 09/08/2023 at 00:51, St Enodoc said:

Something to do with direct access between all of the fiddle yard roads and all of the running lines?

Not quite; you're sort of on the right lines.

 

It's actually to do with the Maryport & Carlisle route. Including the ability to run those services was a bit problematical on the plan. If we take a quick look:

 

The M&C route away from Citadel (right-to-left) crosses the top of the three bridges shown and then I just need to lose those lines (via the relatively simple expedient of them descending quite steeply (short trains) and straight into Central as shown. However, as with all the lines in and around Carlisle, the goods traffic does different things! So the red line indicates where these will run. My current thinking is that this can possibly double up as a relief goods line between Bog Junc and Central which might come in useful.

 

It ends up as what appears to be a separate stretch of double track heading away from the station but in fact it is two single tracks. Shown by the red arrow on the picture below.

 

Passenger trains will only be able to use Plat.1 at Central (but that's OK, as it's just local passenger trains) but the goods trains will need to be able to access the goods yard fully; the change from single to double slip facilitates this.

 

The picture shows that this all needs to be installed before I can fix the baseboard above in place for keeps.

 

Edited August 10, 2023 by LNER4479

[LNER4479]

And now, having waited patiently on Shap Bank for over two weeks (!)

 

Reinstated wiring for plats 3/4 allows the Perth express to arrive!

 

Hmm ... Station getting a bit full now. Let's have a departure.

 

Yet another out-of-the-box loco - a Bachmann Patriot - departs plat.1

 

And the 'classic' Shap scene. Loco well within itself on such a train. It's not all 10-12 coach expresses.