NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Brad Morris
Date: 2014 Mar 2, 22:06 -0500
I've done contract work for GE Transportation, where they make heavy duty freight locomotives. The answer to location is GPS and the entire rail network is coded into a database, some of which is local other parts are not loaded. Changing work orders, speed zones, weather changes & etc are sent to the loco by radio, by cell and when in certain areas, by wireless. The job of an engineer has be thoroughly deskilled. The locomotive drives itself (controls the throttle & brake) and is far more efficient than a human. The human's job is to look out the window and take care of 'unusual' events.
Consider the system to be like your talking GPS, on layers of steroids. Its over 500,000 lines of software, and an unbelievable number of concurrent processes and processors.
Brad
It mighty be interesting to note that railroads moved trains in segments (blocks) governed by hand written Train Orders where the Engineer was directed to proceed to a point and often to wait to meet another train until a certain time before proceeding to the next segment. The dispatcher issuing these orders had knowledge of all traffic in his division. In this case it is obvious that the engineers of an East West train meeting a West East train on a side track would have to have very accurately synchronized time.As radio communication became common and Centralized Traffic Control (CTC) was adopted the importance of individual timepieces decreased. Not sure if GPS is used now, but I remember a technical meeting where it was first proposed.Don************************************** Kepler finds 674 Earth size planets http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/newsblog/Kepler-Mission-Hits-3500-Candidates-230867391.html New images from Japan at http://benbray.com/ Don E. Bray Mail P. O. Box 10315, College Station, Texas 77842-0315 Office/Cellular 979-492-9534 Faith in science http://debclltx.com/Apparently observatories made money by selling time to the railroads, or at least this history of an observatory says so:
See page 110 of the above document:
“One way that many nineteenth-century American observatories, including
the Washburn Observatory, earned additional income was by selling accurate
time signals to railroad companies and other businesses, such as jewelers and
clock-makers.”
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Mike Mayer
From: NavList@fer3.com [mailto:NavList@fer3.com] On Behalf Of Lu Abel
Sent: Sunday, March 02, 2014 1:16 PM
To: mwmayer{at}tds.net
Subject: [NavList] Re: Railroad Time
Interesting article (and pretty much as I suspected, the telegraph was used for time synchronization). But the author seems very unaware of the equation of time (as demonstrated by the analemma) and so has the layman's misunderstanding that the sun is directly south (or "directly overhead") at local apparent noon. Surely even with a clock of even modest accuracy one would notice that the sun was not always "directly overhead" at "noon local time" every day of the year.
From: Mike Mayer <mwmayer{at}tds.net>
To: luabel{at}ymail.com
Sent: Sunday, March 2, 2014 8:31 AM
Subject: [NavList] Re: Railroad Time
Here’s an article about time synchronization via telegraph:
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Mike Mayer
From: NavList@fer3.com [mailto:NavList@fer3.com] On Behalf Of Brad Morris
Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2014 11:21 PM
To: mwmayer{at}tds.net
Subject: [NavList] Re: Railroad Time
Hi Don
I realize it was a long time ago, and you were a young boy by your own admission, but I hope we can squeeze a few more details out of you! Its okay if you don't remember or you weren't privy to the info.
You mentioned an Inspector who traveled around with a master clock. Did you ever see that master clock? Did they transfer that time to a station master clock? And then from the station to the conductors?
When you said "he could compare" his watch to the master clock, I assume you meant your dad. Could you explain a bit more how he did that comparison?
Brad
On Mar 1, 2014 10:52 PM, "Don E. Bray" <debray1---.com> wrote:
I can shed some light on this since my father was a railroad engineer (driver, to the UK folks).
When I was a small boy in East Texas in the early 40's, I remember going down to the jewelry store in our town when he was home and comparing his pocket watch to the large standard pendulum clock on the wall. The link to standard time was the inspector who traveled up and down the railroad with his standard watch. The railroads had extensive private telephone/telegraph networks and I expect that he could periodically compare his watch with the standard railroad clock. My father got his first wrist watch in the '50's, I think.
On time performance was important to all railroad personnel.
Thanks for prompting this flash beck.
Don Bray
**************************************Kepler finds 674 Earth size planetshttp://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/newsblog/Kepler-Mission-Hits-3500-Candidates-230867391.htmlNew images from Japan at http://benbray.com/Don E. BrayMail P. O. Box 10315, College Station, Texas 77842-0315Office/Cellular 979-492-9534Faith in science http://debclltx.com/
On Mar 01, 2014, at 09:01 PM, Norm Goldblatt <ngold---.net> wrote:How interesting. Of course, this begs the question, but what about Church Bells? Big Ben? Maybe it was more important to be locally in sync with your townspeople than to be absolutely correct.
Norm
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