Blue and white posts lineside

[Metr0Land]

These blue and white posts have recently appeared at Ferryside (and presumably elsewhere on the network).  Can anyone say what they're for pls?

[Fat Controller]

15 minutes ago, Metr0Land said:

These blue and white posts have recently appeared at Ferryside (and presumably elsewhere on the network).  Can anyone say what they're for pls?

Could this show a buried cable run or similar, anticipating future re-signalling works? 

[Southernman46]

Chainage markers ?

[Wickham Green too]

2 hours ago, Southernman46 said:

Chainage markers ?

They'd need A LOT of those !

[Southernman46]

Yes - one every chain - as in the photo 

[The Stationmaster]

But exactly where, or what, is that at Ferryside?  The view doesn't make much sense tome in relation to what remains of the railway there.  The stuff on the right looks rather like rock defences on the waterfront so is this a protective wall to keep the sea out?

Edited July 21, 2023 by The Stationmaster

[Jeremy Cumberland]

They don't look like they're every chain, although it can be hard to tell with a telephoto lens, but their sequential numbering looks like they are something to do with surveying or setting out. The spacing could be every 10 metres, but I'm not sure they're equally spaced.

 

They look to be too far from the track (is that a ballast shoulder on the left?) to be connected with the permanent way itself, so I would expect them to be associated with some other work.

[Metr0Land]

This shot taken with a pole is almost exactly 2 yrs ago from the same spot.  You can see the taller stick in this shot which also visible in my shot.  I've been here since 2014 and the sea wall/defences are unchanged in this period.

 

Edited July 21, 2023 by Metr0Land

[Southernman46]

7 hours ago, Southernman46 said:

Yes - one every chain - as in the photo 

Here's a radical thought - NR have installed chainage markers along the sea wall section to enable precise location & reporting of any issues easily by train crew - explains why they are so tall and prominent.

Chainage markers can be any distance from the track - there's no set distance.

[Enterprisingwestern]

22 hours ago, Southernman46 said:

Chainage markers ?

 

9 hours ago, Southernman46 said:

Yes - one every chain - as in the photo 

 

1 hour ago, Southernman46 said:

Here's a radical thought - NR have installed chainage markers along the sea wall section to enable precise location & reporting of any issues easily by train crew - explains why they are so tall and prominent.

Chainage markers can be any distance from the track - there's no set distance.

 

It almost sounds like you know what you are talking about, no place for you on RMWewb!!

 

Mike.

[The Stationmaster]

2 hours ago, Southernman46 said:

Here's a radical thought - NR have installed chainage markers along the sea wall section to enable precise location & reporting of any issues easily by train crew - explains why they are so tall and prominent.

Chainage markers can be any distance from the track - there's no set distance.

So maybe something to do with monitoring what the wall is (or isn't?) doing?  There must somewhere be  some sort of norice to traincrews exaplking what the things are for or are they for PW staff monitoring so they know the exact chainage when a a stranger to the area does a walk through etc?

[Wickham Green too]

4 hours ago, Southernman46 said:

... Chainage markers can be any distance from the track - there's no set distance.

Er ....... so long as they're positioned perpendicular from the actual chain-point on the track : the markers themselves won't be exactly a chain apart on curves !

[Jeremy Cumberland]

Do NR still use chains? Some years ago they were talking about changing to fully metric, which really just meant changing route miles to kilometres, for everything else was metric anyway from what I could see. Even then, I don't think chains were much used, and yards was the more usual subdivision as I recall.

 

Perhaps if anyone sees any more of these markers they can check what the numbers go up to. If they stop at 79 or 80 before going back to 0 or 1, then they are chains. If they carry on up to 99 or 100, then they are something else.

[PaulRhB]

1 hour ago, Jeremy Cumberland said:

Do NR still use chains? Some years ago they were talking about changing to fully metric

Yes still all in miles and chains. Metric fizzled out again. 
We do have to teach it to most new entrants but they seem to get it fast and we have a guide on the panel to help at first. 

Southernman46 knows his chains very well indeed 😁

[Enterprisingwestern]

8 hours ago, PaulRhB said:

Yes still all in miles and chains. Metric fizzled out again. 
We do have to teach it to most new entrants but they seem to get it fast and we have a guide on the panel to help at first. 

Southernman46 knows his chains very well indeed 😁

 

I think metrication has had quite a number of fizzles, when I started at the gas board in 1969 I was told that by the time I'd finished my apprenticeship it would be in full swing, so in the meantime we'd have to learn imperial and SI units concurrently, and guess what?!!

 

Mike.

[Southernman46]

9 hours ago, PaulRhB said:

Yes still all in miles and chains. Metric fizzled out again. 
We do have to teach it to most new entrants but they seem to get it fast and we have a guide on the panel to help at first. 

Southernman46 knows his chains very well indeed 😁

Oh yes - one gets to know the 22 times table very well 😁

 

The only place I ever saw fully metre-d up was the GWML from Paddington as far as Heathrow (?) when first electrified.

 

The other reason I think these are chainage markers is that modern Mileposts etc (especially on the old SR) are blue / white which I imagine is the NR standard now (?) - it's  a few years since I've had access to these.

[PaulRhB]

11 minutes ago, Southernman46 said:

The other reason I think these are chainage markers is that modern Mileposts etc (especially on the old SR) are blue / white which I imagine is the NR standard now (?) - it's  a few years since I've had access to these.

Yes, that made sense to me as well and it follows the white text on the same blue format so I agree the most likely explanation. 

[Jeremy Cumberland]

When I worked for London Underground in the 1980s, all distances were in kilometres. I admit I'd rather expected NR to have caught up by now. Furthermore, banging in new blue marker posts would be an ideal opportunity to change.

[PaulRhB]

1 hour ago, Jeremy Cumberland said:

When I worked for London Underground in the 1980s, all distances were in kilometres. I admit I'd rather expected NR to have caught up by now. Furthermore, banging in new blue marker posts would be an ideal opportunity to change.

The problem is it’s not just marker posts, it’s on the panels, many publications from sectional appendix, track diagrams to the rulebook, it’s a vast undertaking to spend the money to change it when apart from the unit itself there’s nothing wrong with it or less safe about it. It’s spending money that is needed elsewhere far more especially with the current guiding ethos to save every penny. LU is a tiny system in comparison 😉

[Jeremy Cumberland]

Offset against the one-off cost of change is the ongoing cost of repeatedly converting everything, or of measuring it again in metres, even though there is an existing measurement in miles and chains. PW use metric units, and I am pretty sure that S&T do too. Calculating the distance from a signal at 45.423 km to a set of points at 44.544 km is straightforward, but when the positions are 28m 17ch 21y and 27m 54ch 6y, the calculation is far from straightforward, and it is all to easy to make mistakes.

 

Furthermore, printed documents are one thing, but how do people actually write down milages? If you read a handwritten 51.75 (or 51-75 - they can be difficult to distinguish between), do you interpret it as 51 miles and 75 chains or 51¾ miles?

 

I no longer work in the rail industry (other than as a volunteer on a heritage line), but I happen to work in an industry that uses a unit of measure even more obscure than miles and chains: the gross. On the shopfloor, the standard subdivision is twelves or twelfths: one twelfth of a gross. As with your having to teach chains to new entrants, so we have to teach gross and twelfths. Of course, neither product counters nor our business computer system can cope with gross and twelfths. Product counters count in each, and the business system uses decimal gross, so operators have to convert from each to gross and twelfths to write on the works order, do calculations by hand in gross and twelfths (54-3 minus 0-4 scrap is 53-11, for example) and then convert from gross and twelfths to decimal gross to enter data onto the business system. Not surprisingly, errors are common, particularly with new operators.

 

There are a couple of good reasons why we work in gross, but mostly it is just historical. I expect that when the current crop of managers retire in the next couple of years, those of us who remain will take the plunge and change all uses of gross to each (or in some cases to kilograms). It'll be a bit of a mess till we get a new buisness system, since the current system does not allow us to change the primary unit of measure, but we'll get a new business system eventually, and gross will be no more.

[phil-b259]

17 minutes ago, Jeremy Cumberland said:

Offset against the one-off cost of change is the ongoing cost of repeatedly converting everything, or of measuring it again in metres, even though there is an existing measurement in miles and chains. PW use metric units, and I am pretty sure that S&T do too. Calculating the distance from a signal at 45.423 km to a set of points at 44.544 km is straightforward, but when the positions are 28m 17ch 21y and 27m 54ch 6y, the calculation is far from straightforward, and it is all to easy to make mistakes.

 

 

In technical terms everything is specified in metric - the standard distance between an AWS magnet and a signal is defined as 200m for new works or 183m (which equates to 200yards for expiating installations that used imperial measurements when they were designed) for example. Rails are ordered and supplied in metric lengths, the track gauge is only ever defined in mm, etc

 

However mileposts are not technical things - they are essentially an easy way of  saying ‘I am here’  when you don’t have a gps receiver handy or the ability to measure so many meters from a specific point.

 

As such the fact that the railway is measured in miles and chains isn’t an an obstacle for the engineering departments because it’s only used to determine a location along the line. Once you get there all the work you do (which is technical) will be defined in SI units.

 

Meanwhile the cost and hassle of re- measuring the entire railway into metric distances just for what might be termed navigational purposes would be hugely costly and doesn’t provide any operational benefit to anyone. 

 

 

Edited July 22, 2023 by phil-b259

[PaulRhB]

1 hour ago, Jeremy Cumberland said:

Furthermore, printed documents are one thing, but how do people actually write down milages? If you read a handwritten 51.75 (or 51-75 - they can be difficult to distinguish between), do you interpret it as 51 miles and 75 chains or 51¾ miles?

It’s written 51m 75c although we will use 51 and a ¼ , ½ or ¾  Drivers will then say about 2 chains London side of the 51 ¼ m and safety comms mean if there’s any doubt the Signaller checks. The system works and confusion is usually caused only if the mileage and location  name don’t match so you then check further. Further on our panel we have three differing sets of mileage. The mainline from Basingstoke to Exeter is one, the Line via Southampton means the mileages are higher one side of the junction than the other and at our second main junction the mileages come from London via Westbury so you travel down to Salisbury on three lines, two heading West and one heading East! 
So you have to check every time what line it is as 84m to 96m are repeated on two different lines. As a result checking is so frequent that it really isn’t an issue. 
Bridge are probably the worst locations as many describe it by the road and several of our lines cross the same road two or three times due to the junctions and the road following the railway on others. We know which bridges tend to get hit but you can’t be 100% sure sometimes. Always use the bridge number plate as it tells us exactly where it is. 
 

[The Stationmaster]

3 hours ago, Jeremy Cumberland said:

When I worked for London Underground in the 1980s, all distances were in kilometres. I admit I'd rather expected NR to have caught up by now. Furthermore, banging in new blue marker posts would be an ideal opportunity to change.

LUL went metric a good while back but BR didn't although overhead electrification structures have long been measured and numbered in metric form.

 

But - as long as it still apllies the official EU distance measurement for railway on the UK national network is miles and chains (and by implication yards as well) and they simple units to work with and easy enough to learn.  Using them also avoids big numbers when you're dividing down - with the large unit as a mile you only have 80 chains to worry about instead of 1,000 metres in a kilometre.  Train timing with a stop watch is also simple as you take the time in x seconds over a quarter mile and divide it into 900 to get theh speed in mph - simple mental arithmetic.

 

And - as already noted - the cost of change would be massive involving total re-measurent and signing of the entire network, altering thousands of dicuments and plans and converting every traction unit speedometer plus reprogramming a lot of computer systems including a number of safety related ones.

 

Strangely (or not) everyone is familiar with MPH as a unit of measuring speed and changing that has long been discounted so if you're sticking with that it's logical to use the associated units for measuring distance.   And the chain as a unit of measurement no doubt  gives cricket fans a clear idea of distance

[Compound2632]

3 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

And the chain as a unit of measurement no doubt  gives cricket fans a clear idea of distance

 

Unless they're Australian, in which case they know how long 20 m is.

[The Stationmaster]

8 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Unless they're Australian, in which case they know how long 20 m is.

Are you sure?  A cticket pitch is actually 20.12 metres between the stumps so that might explain why some Australian bowlers can't hit the stumps of bowl for a catch?