Signalling Saltfleet - on the bench

[Dave-5-5-7]

6 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

A good few years back i was offered up as 'guinea pig sort of signalman' fora factory of a new computer screen based signalling control system as the designers wanted to see how a real operator would take to the system which was the first they were going to deliver for a UK installation.  So I had brief familiarisation session and the option - which i could change from one to t'other as I went - of using either a trackerball anda couple of press buttons or an extremely impressive mouse, beautiful thing to use and fitted my hand spot on.  Anyway off we went through various tests, with an ergonomist from the company I was working for noting whatever it is that ergonomists take note of, doing all the everyday things like calling and cancelling routes, individual point control  and so on.

 

 Then we moved to faults and failures - and every 'track circuit' - actually axle counter sections - on one of the two screens (the country end) went red.  Then I frightened myself stiff - because the software made it ridiculously simple to reset the whole lot, all in one go, no selection of individual sections, with a couple of clicks of the mouse irrespective of which sections had really been occupied prior to the failure.  The designers got a very stiff talking to about the ease with which a faultre could be cleared so had to rewrite the software for clearing that sort of failure

 

When I was between AB and TCB courses I was put into Goxhill to shadow a signaller who was being shadowed, Saturday morning the whole place lit up and every alarm went off with a power failure. We looked at each other and went "uh-oh!"