British Rail

How do you make the trains run on time? British Rail adopted TOPS, a computer system born of IBM’s SAGE defense project, along with work from Standford and Southern Pacific Railroad. Before TOPS, running the railroad took paper. Lots of paper, ranging from a train’s history, assignments, and all the other bits of data required to keep the trains moving. TOPS kept this data in real-time on computer screens all across the system. While British Rail wasn’t the only company to deploy TOPS, they were certainly proud of it and produced the video you can see below about how the system worked.

There are a lot of pictures of old big iron and the narrator says it has an “immense storage capacity.” The actual computers in question were a pair of IBM System/370 mainframes that each had 4 MB of RAM. There were also banks of 3330 disk drives that used removable disk packs of — gasp — between 100 and 200 MB per pack.

As primitive and large as those disk drives were, they pioneered many familiar-sounding technologies. For example, they used voice coils, servo tracking, MFM encoding, and error-correcting encoding.

Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: TOPS Runs The 1970s British Railroad” →

If you were to visit a railway almost anywhere in the world, you would find that unless it was in some way running heritage trains, the locomotives would bear a similarity to each other. Electric traction is the norm, whether it comes from a trackside supply or from a diesel generator. In the middle of the last century, as the industry moved away from steam traction though, this was far from a certainty. Without much in the way of power electronics, it was a challenge to reliably and efficiently control a large traction motor, so there were competing traction schemes using mechanical gearboxes or hydraulic drives. One of these is the subject of an archive film released by the oil company Shell, and it’s a fascinating journey into a technology that might have been.

A model of a gearbox, in black and white. — The Fell differential gearbox.

All diesel locomotive designs struggle with the problem of transmitting the huge torque required to start a fully loaded train at low speeds, and because of the huge force required, it’s impossible to design a locomotive-sized conventional gearbox to do the job in the way it might be managed on a truck. Electric and hydraulic drives exploit the beneficial torque characteristics of electric and hydraulic motors, but the mechanical gearbox isn’t quite done for. The subject of the video is British Rail number 10100, otherwise commonly known as the Fell locomotive, and it was a one-off prototype that took to the rails at the start of the 1950s designed to test a very novel gearbox design.

At the heart of the Fell gearbox is a set of differential gears the same as you’d find in the axle of a car, and in the locomotive they are used to combine the output of more than one engine. The loco had four smaller-than-normal diesel traction motors that could be combined, but even then, it wasn’t done. To achieve variable torque, they employed superchargers driven by a set of even-smaller diesel engines, resulting in an ungainly multi-engined beast but with the desired characteristics for both starting heavy trains and for moving them at high speed. Continue reading “Retrotechtacular: The Fell Locomotive” →