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<\/a><\/div>\nTen or 15 years ago when I used to visit the National Railway Museum in York very often, I was very excited about the realtime railway signalling display they had installed on a balcony overlooking the East Coast Main Line which runs past the musuem.\u00a0 Could this really be live, I wondered?\u00a0 And yes, it was.\u00a0 Five screens showing real time train movements along the lines from north of Doncaster to Northallerton in Yorkshire.\u00a0 I spent hours looking over the displays and learning how everything worked.\u00a0 It was a real treat for a signalling enthusiast.\u00a0 Many lunchbreaks I spent there, after eating my lunch at the rather nice cafe (at which I receive a discount of 36.25% for being a member of the museum’s Friends).\u00a0 After a while I had picked up enough information, from watching the displays and from talking to more knowledgable visitors, to be able to explain the display to other visitors, and I would also give short talks to groups of schoolchildren as they visited the museum.<\/p>\n
There were problems, however.\u00a0 The analogue monitors were subject to disturbance from the electrical interference generated by powerful electric locomotives as they drew power from the overhead lines.\u00a0 This would scramble the displays for a minute or so as trains left the station travelling north towards Newcastle.\u00a0 Over time the displays themselves became tired\u00a0and began to fail, and it proved too difficult for the museum to arrange for them to be repaired.\u00a0 Such systems are built by disparate consortia and put into museums as a result of goodwill and negotiation.\u00a0 As people move on and firms are taken over or close down, the network of contacts which installed the displays can disperse.\u00a0 First, the departures board stopped working, and then one monitor after another failed and was switched off.\u00a0\u00a0I recall the day when I went to the museum to see a notice declaring that\u00a0the display was to be removed; I was very sad.\u00a0 This became one reason why I no longer regularly visited the museum.<\/p>\n
Earlier this week however I visited once again to have lunch, and went up to the gallery to see what was going on in the workshops.\u00a0 Imagine my surprise and joy to see that the live display had been modernised and re-presented, with five new flat-screen displays offering a much improved view of ECML operations.\u00a0 I was thrilled.\u00a0 The NRM had pulled a rabbit out of the hat.\u00a0 My future visits to the NRM will be much happier ones.\u00a0 Thanks, NRM!<\/p>\n
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