Neil Urquhart

On 07/05/2024 at 18:22, HillsideDepot said:

Thank you Neil. The font is Dotrice which I found on-line. Its set to bold in my reports, the normal version looks like the ribbon is long over due replacement! 

Excellent, that's going to be used on all sorts of things now...  :-)

On 03/05/2024 at 12:02, HillsideDepot said:

 

Its very basic, but I use an Excel spreadsheet with various tabs representing the Train File, Location File, Wagon File, etc which I copy and paste in to a train report. It doesn't exactly replicate the TOPS version, but has data I want for my model, presented in a TOPS-like format.

As I say, very simple, but fun to use as a working document for my layout. 

That's rather nice!  Just out of inteest what fonr did you use to get the dot matrix chars, they look suitably "spotty"!

On 03/05/2024 at 10:48, C126 said:

If you could provide the full bib. details please, for those of us that do have legal access to the journals, it would be appreciated.  Congrats and many thanks.  Neil.

It'll appear in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing at some point (no word on the actual issue), if you don't have access to a subscription, let me known and I can forward a copy.

Cheers,

Neil

Dear All,

This has finally been accpted for publication, but in an IEEE Journal so I guess many on here won't see it.  The copyright is all a bit complex so the easiest thing if anyone wants to read i would just be to email me at n.urquhart@napier.ac.uk and I can  send you a copy of a draft PDF (not the published version for obscure and very dull copyright reasons). 

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread, it wouldn't have happend without you.

Now, who's going to be the first to include a TOPS office with a complete set of Ventek kit on their layout?

 Or to go further, given that many layouts modelling mechanical signalling use bell codes, who's going to be the first to have some software that produces TOPS printouts for the trains running on their layout.  If anyone actually wants to try that I'd be happy to help write a very scalled down version of TOPS (TOPS-OO?) for fun that could respond to a few commands and produce some reports.

Neil U.

Just now, C126 said:

 

Please let us know the bibliographic details of both articles a.s.a.p.  Looking forward to reading them.  Thanks.

 

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 

16 hours ago, 4630 said:

It’s an interesting short film.

 

It really reinforces how ‘cutting edge’ BR’s use of technology was in this part of its operations at that time, to improve efficiency. 
 

 

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. 

On 23/11/2023 at 14:20, Rivercider said:

Hi Neil.

I came to TOPS a few years after it was first introduced. I joined BR in 1977 in the civil engineers and used TOPS for wagon enquiries.

Initially the terminal down the corridor was shared with another department, and worse than that it had a shared line with another terminal I think in another building. We had to press a button to 'poll' the machine, if the other terminal was in use we had to wait, when the bell rang we had about 30 seconds to get an enquiry in, then we had use of the terminal.

In 1978 I transferred to Bristol TOPS office. We had 4 terminals, 2 terminals on line. The 2 terminals off line  where we used the cards to produce shunt lists and train lists. By 1978 we were using the smaller punch cards though I was told the office originally used the larger punch cards. Within a couple of years TOPS started to go cardless, the Bristol office was the last in the West of England Division to go cardless, possibly in late 1980.

By 1978 TOPS had been accepted by most outdoor staff, though there were some problems when we had outages and staff had to wait for lists. We were helped as some of the local supervisors who worked in the Bristol yards also covered shifts as Area Freight Assistant in the TOPS office, so they could see our problems, and be useful to us when they were working outside in the yard.

 

Bristol TOPS Office in 1980. Cards are still in use at this date. The rack on the wall had the trainlist  header cards as I recall.

There were 4 terminals, the two nearest the camera were the two on line machines operating at 200 Baud I think.

The nearest Y1 machine was the one that received the incoming train consists. The machine by the window, and another out of sight to the left were the off line machines we used to produce the yard shunt lists and train lists.

Out of sight to the right was a block of 7 tables, three on the far side of the room occupied by the Area Freight Assistant and two freight clerks. The nearest 3 tables had the wooden card racks that represented the different yard files, the chair on the right is facing those desks. By the window was the desk with the yard file for Bristol Kingsland Road the busiest yard and one where a full yard file was kept, ie each pack of cards represented an individual siding.

24/5/80

 

cheers

 

 

 

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

On 22/11/2023 at 15:17, The Stationmaster said:

I think a crucial difference between CPC was that CPC was based ona count of the number of wagons at a location whereas TOPS was based on the individual wagon number (which could be seen as a direct consequence of SP needing a system to replace manual processes involving car/wagon numbers).  CPC was effectively out of use by the time I went to work in South Wales in 1971 and the first TOPS installation didn't appear there until early 1974.  In user acceptance terms a minor battle which TOPS had to fight in south wales was the impression which had been left by teh shortcomings of CPC although any yards already using ATI could see that benefit widening as the principal was extended to all arriving trains and even local trip freights.

 

On the WR there were two TOPS trial sites - the first was at Exeter commissioned in 1973 and using standard IBM terminal equipment and punched cards.  Radyr, the second WR trial site, commissioned in early 1974 used Ventek terminals and much smaller punched cards (about a quarter of the size of an IBM card so I was told).  I understand that Radyr was the first BR site to commission with Ventek terminals although I think there might have been one on another Region commissioning at about the same time.  

 

The Ventek terminals replaced the IBM kit as the principal local terminal fit  as they required less room particularly for the card files - one for every location, one for every siding in amarshalling yard withe cards filed in the order they stood in the siding.  Cards were originally very much at the heart of teh system at local level beause they were used to produce  all the various reports locally which required a paper output such as Train lists and Shunt Lists

 

Another technical innovation at Radyr was the use of (wet print) facsimile machines working over several miles in order reduce telephone reporting - very important for busy colliery locations.  One fascinating technical aside emerged from these as it was found that BT telephone lines were incapable of matching anything approaching the baud rate that could be achieved on BR internal lines or was needed by these particular fax machines - even to a Shunter's cabin at a colliery up in the Welsh Valleys.

 

It is probably worth reembering a that smething which facilitated teh introduction of Y TOPS with masses of data passioing over teh BR network was teh advanced state of the BR telecoms network which already undergoing major upgrades by the early 1970s

s.

 

It is probably worth reembering a that smething which facilitated teh introduction of Y TOPS with masses of data passioing over teh BR network was teh advanced state of the BR telecoms network which already undergoing major upgrades by the early 1970s

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

On 22/11/2023 at 13:50, Oldddudders said:

I am ashamed to say I had very little involvement with TOPS, even though in 1976/7 the patch I worked on had a TOPS office - Hither Green. Quite simply the thing ran like clockwork (sorry) with the yard supervisor and a couple of clerks, and other areas of management were much more demanding, including a shed-full of carriage cleaners, being egged on by militant drivers with an eye to Sectional Council roles.

 

But I distinctly recall packs of punch-cards being used and run through readers, and Ventek was a name from that time. I had a schoolmate who had worked for IBM in the late '60s, and when I told him some of the kit he was astonished, since it had been obsolete then. ISTR being told that IBM had to restart manufacture of old kit when BR was setting up.

 

Another useless snippet - a couple of years, and jobs, later, my assistant was married to a lady who was a programmer at BRB, and I'm sure he said she wrote in TOPSTRAN, which was presumably a dialect of FORTRAN.  

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

17 hours ago, Cwmtwrch said:

I presume what is known in IT as GIGO 😄.

 

I have, quite unintentionally [I was looking for something else altogether], found the article behind the MR one, which is in "British Transport Review", VII No. 4, Jan 1964. It refers to the use of an English Electric KDN2, which was their first transistor machine; previous EE machines used valves. It would have been one of very few such machines in commercial use at the time, with very  limited capabilities by modern standards. Input checking might have been beyond its capacity, and the need for such checking would also probably not initially have been evident to the users working with something that was very new and strange at the time.

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?  

18 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

They've not just got TOPS of course.  There have been a raft of enhancements and other systems developed, some of which talk to one another - there's TRUST (Train Running Under TOPS) and Realtime Trains for instance.

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. 

18 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

CPC alas fell into the RIRO camp because it didn't include inbuilt checking of information inputs.  Great at first - so I heard - but people very quickly became wary of it as they ordered, say, a train of empties to be sent from A to B only to find out that in reality they weren't at A in the first place and B was already overwhelmed with the damned things.

 

TOPS definitely avoided that trap because of proper data control and checking of various files and datasets against each other,  If it said that x number of wagons were at A then al;most  invariably, albeit with occasional hiccups, they would be there.

 

The oddest thing about TOPs was that it had been designed by the Southern Pacific RR and IBM mainly in order to computerise tasks that had previously been done manually and entered on paperbut many of those things had ceased to be done on Britain's railways decades previously.  About the only British tasks it did duplicate and mechanise were yard stours (a note of what was on each siding in a marshalling yard or sorting yard and normally produced fort the start of each shift),   in time a mechanised method of calculating the load of a train (although in Britain that was done for some  different reasons from those in the USA) , and a list of what was on a train approaching a marshalling location which in Britain had been covered for the most important trains and locations by a system called ATI - Advanced Traffic Information - and was in any case a relatively recent introduction having come only a few years prior to TOPs - but of course TOPS did it for every train).  Some of the reports, especially 'pipeline' reports, which was a listing of various sorts of wagons or loads destined for an area or particular location and was especially important for empties, could with TOPS be obtained at the touch of a few computer keys although whether that was a report specially devised for BR I don't know?

 

But otherwaise it was pure US and a lot of it was written in American as opposed to English - let alone BR english.  So for example 'CARKND' which described the type of wagon on any report was often still in American railwayese.  Thus brakevans were cabooses, abbreviated to CAB in TOPS.  Gtadually all the CARKD codes were rewritten to make them meaningful in a British railway context but that took a year or so.

 

So off we went with a US system to get used to, new terminology to get used to, and lots of information which might or might not be useful plus a lot of extra work for ground staff recording details - by painted number - of every wagon passing into, out of, and around within, a yard.  The latter saw another bit of American with something called a Shunt List which was clearly based on using low grade staff to do shunting work instead of relying on trained men who knew what they were doing and didn't need a piece of paper to tell them how to do it.

 

Train lists at least reduced the need fro a Guard or Train Preparer rto go along a train collecting all the details needed to calvculate the load but initially the load and Brake Force still had to be claculated manually - out of the cold and rain.  Later this process was computerised within the software saving a lot of work and opportunities for mistakes in critical calculations.  But overall, partly as a result of the bargaining to get it accepted and into use at ground level in  - particularly in marshalling yards and at the busier terminals - it meant putting in extra posts which increased costs.

 

But on the other hand it provided a lot of useful information.  A big, if not the biggest,  reason for BR buying TOPS and its considerable ongoing running costs, was to reduce the wagon fleet by more efficient use of wagons especially empties.  wWe could quickly identify where traders were hanging on to wagons and more readily lean on them to get the wagons released.  We actually knew - at last - where empties really were and that was critical to meeting orders for empties, managinga yard some of the old tricks used by yard staff to get a Sunday turn and the managerial subterfuges to avoid giving one could now be studied at leisure and potential causes (i.e particular types of wagons) got rid of as their movement history was betrayed by the system.  

 

This leads on to the biggest benefit BR got out of TOPS - a readilly accessible database

 which relaced most of the daily telephone reporting of freight rolling Stock returns and the collation of those returns at successively larger geographical areas, plus wagons available to move and wagons required.  This meant that the major part of the rolling stock fleet daily management could be concentrated at national level (the CWA - Central Wagon Authority) greatly increasing efficiency helped by wholly accurate information.  This in turn enabled thousands of wagons to be disposed of with massive savings on maintenance.

 

Most importantly to managing a yard, even without going out and looking at the stours and walking around,  you could see traffic or empties building up and do something about it more readily and from a better informed position.  And of course the next managerial level up could see what you were or weren't doing to manage your yard.  This was in some respect a reversal of the US idea where they would be watching the number of wagons for a particular route or destination building up to justify running a train whereas we would be looking to see why wagns hadn;t been cleared on booked trains or the Manned Conditional trains that could go yo various places to keep traffic moving.  It certaiunly helped one of the key factors in running a marshalling yard - keeping it as empty as you could by clearing everything currently and as quickly as possible.

 

And of course we went on courses.  Training courses for the new post of TOPS Clerk were an earlky requirement but as the system spread further there was an interesting course devised called "Managing With TOPS' and it was a way of learning things you hadn't though of already plus some extra training in other uses for things you already knew.  An amusing part of the course was the attendees being divided into small groups of three and set to 'manage' and keep an eye on the working of a particular yard everyday over the week of the course with the course tutor assessing each day what you had come up with.  This required a mass of reports - several forests were no doubt felled every week to meet the need - but what I quickly did was set up for our group a simple input which once made could be left on its own to produce every report we thought we'd need every day.  I'd pop into the room where the terminals were sited, type and enter my code and go off for a leaisurely breakfast or whatever.  Going back later to pick up the pile of paper I soon noticed another chap - a very senior manager as it happens - sitting where I'd left him 15-20 minutes earlier and still busily typing in each report request separately after the prebious one had finished printing.  By Wednesday I'd made sure that he knew how not to waste time at the start of his day = profuse thanks but alas no offer of a job on promotion.

 

Oddly about a decade I spent a day lecturing Management Trainees about the benefits of using TOPS in operations management.   the system took time to settle in, BR did a lot of reprogramming over the years to make it more suitable for British use and to add capabilities which had either not been done in the original SP version or had been done in a way unsuited to British conditions and information needs etc.  but overall perhaps the oddest thing about teh sytem was that something that had been specifically designed for US operating requirements turned out to be incredibly useful in managing an important part of BR's business and resources

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

20 hours ago, Cwmtwrch said:

Not TOPS, but prerhaps of some use, is an article in Modern Railways Feb 1964 "The Western Region modernises in South Wales", which includes information on the 'Continuous Progress Control' system set up in Cardiff in 1962, plus photographs, and refers to the considerable improvement in wagon control that resulted. The system was overtaken by TOPS, but did have some influence on the later system, according to one of the operators. He later joined the Welsh Railways Research Circle just before they published a reprint of the MR article and wrote to express surprise at seeing his photograph, and providing some background, the letter appearing in Newsletter 158 [dated to 2019/20 based on internal evidence in the letter, at which time the writer would have been in his early 80s], which was sent to members only.

 

Not an answer to your questions, I know, and you may well be aware of CPC already, but I though I should mention it in case it is of interest. If it is, the WRRC should be able to supply a copy of the relevant part of the Newsletter, I imagine.

 

The current [as of 2021] owner of TOPS seems to be Network Rail https://www.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Catalogue-of-Railway-Code-Systems.pdf see page 12 onwards.

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