RT Journal Article
T1 A long engagement – railways, data and the information age
A1 Robert  Gwynne
YR 2022
VO 
IS Autumn 2021
K1 Aspinall
K1 BTM
K1 Edmondson
K1 frequency division multiplexing
K1 Hollerith
K1 IBM
K1 ICL
K1 ICT
K1 Phillpotts
K1 Porter
K1 punch cards
K1 route relay interlocking
K1 semi-automatic ground environment
K1 solid state interlocking
K1 St Johnston
K1 Stanier
K1 Tattersall
K1 Total Operations Processing System
K1 Wickens
AB The history of the use of computer and data driven technologies by the railways is largely unknown and is very much overshadowed by a deep fascination with the steam railway. However, it was a willingness to embrace and develop these technologies that laid the foundations for the railway that we have today. This paper aims to show the history of the railway’s ‘long engagement’ with these forms of communication and control technologies. This history forms the background to the increasing adoption of internet-based technology on today’s railway, and thus provides a thread connecting the past, present and future of the rail system.
A central argument here is that railway management of necessity focuses on control to ensure the safe operation and efficient running of trains and the management of a large and scattered workforce.[1] Control of revenue and costs, including wages and pensions,[2] as well as control of trains on heavily used lines, generated the need for control of data from an early stage. Consequently, UK railways were pioneer adopters of a succession of control technologies including the electric telegraph, ‘Hollerith’ tabulating machines and digital computers.
NO The first known employee of a railway was Widow Howbourne on the Whickham waggonway (a wooden, horse-drawn railway) in 1645. She was a gatekeeper, essentially a position of control, regulating traffic where the ‘waggonway’ (i.e. a wooden railway) crossed a road. 
NO The London and North Western Railway had a pension scheme from as early as 1853.
NO William Stanier (1876–1965) started work as an office boy at the Great Western Railway’s Swindon works, aged 15. He rose through the ranks to eventually become one of the best-known steam locomotive designers in Britain. He was knighted in 1943 and became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1944.
NO Including a rumoured 100 mph run in 1899 – see Robin Jones, ‘British Railway Disasters’ (Mortons, 2016), page 52.
NO Gresley’s designs would include the LNER A4 – of which Mallard would take the world speed record for a steam locomotive in July 1938.
NO The L&Y had started by using a ‘trial installation’ ‘involving five tabulators and many key punches’ three years before (Pugh, 1995, p 18).
NO See Bradbury, F, 1912, Jacquard Mechanism and Harness Mounting (Belfast: John Heywood Ltd)
NO Waybills were the means of keeping track of freight shipments.
NO See Dictionary of National Biography entry for Branwell Bronte https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-3526. For a fuller account of this episode see Barker (1994).
NO Aspinall had first been to the US in 1870 when an apprentice at Crewe Works under Francis Webb. In 1905 Aspinall visited the US with George Hughes, Chief Mechanical Engineer of the L&Y (who hosted Stanier in 1908). In 1908 five senior members of the L&Y had been sent to the US by Aspinall, including J Tatlow, the Chief Clerk (Bulleid, 1967, p 178).
NO The Great Western Railway company’s magazine, though it was available to the public as well as employees.
NO Great Western Railway Magazine (1907) p 250
NO Great Western Railway Magazine (1907) p 210. NB Driver’s pay was complicated to calculate as it was made up of a flat rate, plus mileage and overtime, paid weekly, in cash. Returns also covered supplies used.
NO For example, declining the invitation to help fund a light railway to link Clayton le Moors with the L&Y network at Accrington in 1913.
NO Nigel Gresley (1876–1941), who was knighted in 1936, was the designer of Mallard, the fastest steam locomotive ever, and a star exhibit at the National Railway Museum.
NO Evidenced by a report in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph 28 February 1907.
NO ‘A Date with History’ – https://dailybritain.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/18th-march-1915-women-in-wartime/ (accessed 25 March 2019)
NO Railway Magazine for 1918, p 208
NO https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/smarterrail/ (accessed 29 March 2019)
NO https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/tabulator/ (accessed 29 March 2019)
NO ‘The British Tabulating Machine Co. Ltd 1907–1957’ – unpublished manuscript held at University of Manchester Archives, page 3, author unknown.
NO https://everything.explained.today/Harold_Keen/ (accessed 2 July 2019)
NO ‘The British Tabulating Machine Co. Ltd 1907–1957’ – unpublished manuscript held at University of Manchester Archives, further reveals in Chapter 3 (page 4) that ‘3 semi-trailers landed at D Day plus six with a generator lorry. Of the work undertaken mention may be made of vehicle census records, production of a monthly order of battle in formation order…the recording of honours and awards…medical statistics…the analysis and tabulation of the results of wireless listener research’, hence BTM and Hollerith machines were a part of the war effort and not just on the home front.
NO Perhaps the best being the ‘Black Five’, which was largely based on GWR practice. A number are preserved including one at Locomotion, the NRM at Shildon.
NO Much is made of the fact that the ‘non-stop’ required two crews to operate the service, but it also required the coordinated efforts of over 200 signalmen from London to Edinburgh.
NO John Liffen in https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/revealing-the-real-cooke-and-wheatstone-telegraph-dial/ (accessed 4 April 2019).
NO The track circuit remains to this day a key component of remote train detection and part of the ‘architecture’ of railway signalling. A ‘track circuit’ works by a low voltage current through the rails which a train then short circuits when at that location, causing a relay to indicate the train’s presence on a panel at the signal box. ‘Track Circuits’ first appeared on the London, Chatham and Dover railway in 1864, with a fail-safe version being developed by the Irish born William Robinson in the United States in 1872.
NO http://distantwriting.co.uk/cookewheatstone.html (accessed 4 April 2019)
NO http://distantwriting.co.uk/cookewheatstone.html (accessed 4 April 2019)
NO In the Armagh accident of 1899, 80 people were killed, many on a ‘Sunday School’ outing. This led to the ‘Regulation of Railways Act’ which compelled the use of automatic continuous brakes on passenger trains, the block system of signalling and the interlocking of all points and signals. This is often taken as the beginning of the modern era in UK rail safety.
NO See HS2 for example, basically a bypass for a railway which first opened in 1838. 
NO Railway Magazine, April 1934, p 273
NO See https://www.railwaysignalling.eu/railway-interlocking-principles-railwaysignalling (accessed 29 September 2021). ‘Interlocking’ is an essential feature of a signalling control as it prevents conflicting moves being set up or communicated to drivers.
NO Railway Gazette, 1951, p 630
NO Doncaster South signal box planned before the war as part of this East Coast Main Line modernisation scheme, and finally opened in 1949, was the work of the Railway Systems Group of the GPO Research Station, a hothouse of telecommunications development. The same organisation included engineers that developed Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic digital computer.
NO Solid State Interlocking, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_State_Interlocking for a non-technical explanation of this system (accessed 3 July 2019).
NO This computer had a total storage capacity of about 16K and was at that claimed as one of only two of its kind in Europe.
NO Railway Gazette, 21 November 1958, page 624. The UK had 217 computers in use by 1960 – see Boyns and Edwards (2013, p 242).
NO Railway Magazine, December 1962, p 812. ‘A comprehensive scheme has been evolved but the total cost of automatic recording equipment is unavoidably high for the whole railway network’, p 814.
NO Railway Magazine, August 1963, p 586. Devon’s Road had become the first all diesel depot in the country in 1957, a move in part prompted by the ‘Clean Air Act’ of 1956 as the shed was embedded in the east end of London where smoke nuisance from steam locomotives had become an issue.
NO Michael Harris, British Rail Mark 2 Coaches: the design that launched InterCity, Venture, 1999
NO What Harold Wilson actually said was: "The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4865498.stm in a piece by Brian Waldon, published 31 March 2006 (accessed 9 April 2019).
NO Railway Gazette, 1963, page 148, image on page 176. This was Pegasus 2, serial no. 40 delivered in October 1962, see Lavington (2000, table 4.3).
NO The British Tabulating Machine Co. Ltd. (BTM) became interested in stored-program electronic digital computers in 1951. Their first machine was the HEC2M. ‘HEC’ stood for ‘Hollerith Electronic Computer’. This led to the HEC4, which was soon re-named the BTM 1200 series. There is film of this installation on-line, see https://www.britishpathe.com/video/computer-for-british-rail; see also, ‘Delivery lists and applications of the BTM HEC computers and the BTM/ICT 1200 series’ (a PDF) http://www.ourcomputerheritage.org/ccs-t1x1.pdf (accessed 3 April 2021).
NO Sometimes not a ‘wage packet’ but a numbered tin.
NO Interview with Brian Bushell, Tremadoc, Wales, 2 December 2016.
NO Communication from John McGhee, 5 April 2019, with National Railway Museum on ‘British Rail’s Computer Bureau in Reading, Berkshire’ from 1968 onwards.
NO Crewe processed payroll and accounts for the Southern and London Midland Region. Peterborough processed them for the Eastern Region. Darlington computer centre used IBM machines, which covered the North-East and Scottish Region. Reading used Honeywell computers which processed wages and payroll for Western Region and recorded freight movements.
NO The TOPS system was circuit switched, with the phone line remaining open for as long as a signal was being transmitted. Only later was the system moved across to packet switching.
NO ‘Sixty years ago – a look at 1958’, Stephen Clerk, Institute of Railway Signal Engineers News, January 2019, p 15
NO TRUST stands for ‘Trains running under system TOPS’
NO As part of a BR Research programme called TACT – Total Automatic Control of Trains – a Class 304 unit was driven under automatic control from Wilmslow to Mauldeth Road near Manchester on the 20 April 1979. The control centre had two computers, one driving a colour video display of the operational area.
NO APTIS – Accountancy and Passenger Ticket Issuing System – on-train version was called PORTIS. APTIS enabled a standard ticket system (the familiar orange, credit card-sized ticket) and finally got rid of the ‘Edmondson’ system which dated to the 1830s (and which caused Branwell Bronte such trouble). It reduced the timescale for implementing fare changes and streamlined accountancy procedures and was fully implemented by the middle of 1987. Tickets were issued for the outward and return journey and magnetically encoded. Details of all tickets sold were stored, with the machines linked to central computer at Nottingham. The system also had a barcode system enabled. It also enabled payment by cash, cheque, warrant, and credit cards, with an ability to update details of ‘hot’ credit cards.
NO Dina St Johnston, 1930–2007, the founder of Britain’s first software house, was also a Fellow of the Institution of Railway Signal Engineers. See Simon Lavington in References.
NO They are now almost universal (and even feature on bus stops).
NO The railway also had, and has, its own internal telephone network.
NO For example, the record run of the steam locomotive Mallard in 1938 was actually part of a programme that was developing a new form of ‘quick acting’ brake.
NO See Rail Engineer, June 2017, ‘Hacking the Railway’ by Paul Darlington
PB The Science Museum Group
SN 2054-5770
LA eng
DO 10.15180/211603
UL https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/a-long-engagement-railways-data-and-the-information-age/
WT Science Museum Group Journal
OL 30