Neil Urquhart

I'll try and find a way of releasing a proof of the acdemic article (the journals charge a fortune per issue - based on Universities subscribing to the publisher) to people on here. As/when/if the magasine article happens I'll let evryone know Neil U

Thanks! To everyone who's contributed (so far) to this topic, the bits and pieces mentioned here have helped fill in a number of gaps as well as pointing me towards other sources of info. Hopefully there will be a paper appearing in a computing journal setting out the achivements of BR under TOPS and finally ensuring that TOPS (and those who worked on it) gets it's rightful place in computing (& Railway ) history. As the academic paper is likely to be fairly dry, I'll see if one of the monthly railway mags might be interested in a TOPS article which would bring all of this to a wider readership. Once again - thanks! Neil U. PS: Stationmaster Mike - I never recieved the email with your details for the acknowledgemens, send me a PM and I'll add them

As far as I know, the 5 digit loco numbers (known as TOPs numbers) were not acually required by TOPS, but were part of a related system (RAVERS?) which was implemented to deal with loco maintainance at around the same time as TOPS was rolled out. I think that TOPS could cope with a loco number being anthing, as long it was unique (not sure if it could cope with letters for the D & E prefixes). As far as I am aware TOPS does have the concept of grouping locos into classes (with the same technical info for braking and horsepower). I think (and I will try and verify this) that locos were allocated to classes (e.g. 37,47,52) in TOPS irrespective of their actual running number. Neil

In finding out more about CPC I've ended up digging through issues of British Transport Review. One of the more interesting things that I have learned is that in 1964, BR had around 40 computers in use. That's a phenomenal figure for the time. The same article that mentions this also points out that just about all of this usage was at regional level and not country wide. As far as I can make out most this usage was for store keeping and accounts. Who will be the first to add an OO gauge model of a mainframe (complete with blinking lights) to the interior of a railway office? Neil U.

If anyone is interested, the official BR report on TOPS is here https://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/docsummary.php?docID=4923 it makes interesting reading. Neil

BR was very advanced in terms of comms and computing, technologies such as telex and facsimile transmissions were adopted on the railways well before other industries.

Hi , That's fantastic, it's the sort of detail that I'm looking for, the photos are very atmospheric as well. Something I'm interested in is how easily staff accepted TOPS and trusted it? Was there resistance to TOPS when it first appeared, did long-serving employees see the benefits and take to the system? Yours, Neil

Thanks, that's very useful, I'm doing a bit of digging around to find out more about CPC. IN summary it seems to have been a system for managing traffic flows rather than planning and tracking individual wagon movements. I've jsut obtained aload of electronic copies of BTC reports and jornals, I'm hoping that there will be something within that lot! Yours, Neil

I am not sure if TOPSTRAN was based on FORTRAN, my undestanding is that TOPSTRAN is a set of macros (commands) based on IBM assembler (the very specialised instructions used to move data about within the IBM mainframe). Given that IBM had involvement in FORTAN it's probable that they used the naiming convention for their TOPS language as well, there may have also been some similarities in the style of language as well. As far as I am aware TOPSTRAN was unique to TOPS itself. I'm not sure what they currently do for developers, but I suspect someone somewhere has been paid a lot of money to pickup TOPSTRAN to be able to deal with any ongoing maintainance. Neil

In theory..... I can get the University library to request the British Library to photocopy and send over copies of magazine and journal articles. I wondering whether I'll get away with requesting articles from the 60s from Modern Railways and British Transport Review?

Yes, looking through contemporary documentation, it becomes apparent just how much TOPS still drives. One of the advantages of these older systems are that they are often very reliable (the bugs were all found decades ago) and from a technical perspective it's reasonably easy to write software that speaks to them.

Dear Mike, That's fantastic. That backs up a lot of what I had learned. As far as I can make out, most of the BR modifications to TOPS seem to have been around the "front end" rather than the mainframe code. It appears that the SP/IBM system as delivered worked exclusively on punched cards, the significant BR contribution appears to have been the upgrade to VDU based terminals to replace punched cards. The BR based system used Datapoint/Venteck mini computers that were installed in TOPS offices. As far as I can make out, the main development by BR was these systems. I am guessing that a lot of the reporting functionality came through these systems. I started my career writing software that bridged between a very old stock control system and users on PCs. The stock control system still thought it was dealing with punched cards and very primitive printers, but in fact it was driving software running on PCs that reformatted reports, put things into spreadsheets and generally hid the mainframe stuff from the users. BR seems to have been something of pioneer in all of this. Just out of interest, was there much use of punched cards within the BR setup? Various BTF films about TOPS show cards being used to represent wagons, and the status of a yard (i.e. what was parked where) seemed to be represented by the order of the cards in racks. I wonder how long that went on for, before VDUs took over. The UK/US terminology is a pain - the reviewer of the paper has flagged it (it's an anonymous reviewer, but I suspect that they are American), I'm having to add an American/British translation table to define terms such as wagon and carriage. The stuff on training is useful as there was a query from the reviewer about the effects on staff and how staff adapted to the technology. I'd be very happy to add you to the acknowledgements, give me an email at n.urquhart@napier.ac.uk Once again, thanks for taking the time to write all of this down. Neil Urquhart

Thanks Cwmtwrch, I wasn't aware of CPC, but I was aware of ATI (Advance Traffic Information) a telex based system for sending on train details in advance of the train itself. I wonder how similar CPC was - were there a number of systems in use pre-TOPS across the regions, which might have grown from the differing practices of the Big 4? I'll try and tack down more info on CPC. I'm aware that NR own TOPS, but I was wondering about the technical arrangements for running it. The IBM 370 hardware that it was designed around has long since been consigned to museums, so I'm assuming that it's running under emulation on something more modern. Thanks once again for your help. Neil

Hi, I'm a long-time lurker on here, but this is my first actual topic.... During lockdown I started to combined my interests in railways and computing and did a bit of research into the origins of TOPS. A significant discovery was a copy of "TOPS: The Story of a British Railways Project", written by Robert Arnott (who project managed TOPS for the BRB) and published by the BRB, which contains a vast amount of info on the acquisition of TOPS from IBM and the work required to adapt it for use on BR. The sum of all of this has been the preparation of an article for the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Journal (being an academic journal, there's no payment involved....). Whilst I have a lot of technical information, what I am lacking is the viewpoint from the perspective of those who used TOPS day to day. Does anyone on here have any memories of TOPS being rolled out or just using it day to day? I'm particularly interested in how TOPS was view - did those on the ground trust it initially or was it viewed with suspicion? The initial feedback from the journal editor and reviewers was promising, it would be good to get BR some recognition for TOPS as it was very much a cutting edge system when it was rolled out. BR used it more intensively than Southern Pacific had done a lot of development was undertaken - particularly around the terminals located in the TOPS offices. Finally - does anyone know who currently hosts TOPS on behalf of the privatised rail industry? Yours, Neil Urquhart