Automatic Car Identification
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K8UpMNYIPo
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
It was a heck of an idea. RFID wasn't a thing at the time, and data communications weren't what they are today, either.
As I recall, dirt was the issue - after a while the readers couldn't read the decals. Nowadays it would be graffiti.
I got into model railroading a long time ago. Some of my cars have ACI labels on them, as applied by me.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
In my neck of the woods, it wasn't dirt! I was thaw sheds for coal cars and hot ingots being loaded in gons - burn the tags right off the car sides.
At one time I had thoughts of having accurate ACI labels on my models. That wasn't very practical but now there is a program to print accurate scale labels.
Some prototype cars had the labels mounted on standoffs to reduce the effect of heat or dirt running down the car side.
mvlandswAt one time I had thoughts of having accurate ACI labels on my models. That wasn't very practical but now there is a program to print accurate scale labels.
The labels I used were generic, and I do N Scale, so they just looked pretty.
Applying accurate labels to larger scales would certainly be a labor of love.
OTOH, seems like I remember reading once about someone who put barcode labels on the bottom of their cars, with a barcode reader under the tracks...
B&OCT had a IBM 370/30 computer system to manage the car movement data the the Terminal. About 1985 or 86 the computer system was taken down for some routine maintenance. When it came time to restart the system, it would not come up as it had been doing for years. Local personnel tried all the 'tricks of the trade' that had overcome issues in the past, to no avail. The locals then called in the 'heavy hitters' from the B&O system offices in Baltimore - they tried all their tricks of the trade to no avail while dealing with the local levels of IBM. After a week of downtime and the issues being flown up to the highest levels of IBM the problem was found.
When the system had been installed in the early 1970's, the system had integrated the ACI scanners on the B&OCT to feed data to the system in real time. When the AAR made the decision to eliminate ACI, the system was patched to stop the system from looking for the ACI data. Somehow, the patch was incomplete and after about 8 years - a data path that had not been known to exist made a call for the ACI scanners and would not let the system come up an run.
The SP had car (train) washers on each side of some ACI scanners. So the ACI tag would be as clean as possible as the train passed the scanner. Use of these washers DID NOT significantly improve the percentage of good scans.
BaltACDIBM 370/30
Kinda off topic, but an interesting side light nonetheless.
I worked with an IBM machine (4 digit model number - 4300 series?) at the local military base. Our usual IBM tech covered most of the northern part of the state.
He once related to us that he'd been on vacation one time so a sub was sent in. And the sub wreaked havoc on one of the machines (not ours).
Seems IBM built some of the cards for their computers with several discrete functions on each card. As such, in slot one, section A would be used, while if the same card was in slot two, section B would be used.
Occasionally, one section of a card might fail. No problem, swap slot one with slot two and you're back in business. But if section A was bad, it could no longer be used in slot one. It might still work in slot three, though, as that slot used section C. But not in slot four, which again used section A...
I don't know how he kept track of which cards had which section bad, but that was the problem the substitute tech encountered. When he started moving cards around (they're all the same, right?), he ended up putting that card with section A bad back into slot one, etc, etc.
Multiply that by several cards with bad sections being placed in slots that used those bad sections. See where this is going?
It took a while, but when the regular tech got back, he got things sorted out and got that particular machine back 'on the air.'
We had more problems with the band printers than anything else. We had two high-speed printers through which we would put multiple boxes of paper each day. Some reports used a box of paper by themselves. Called John in numerous times during peak production, which was in the evening.
I love proper oilburner printers. There was an episode of some British science-fiction TV episode where the voice of a monster computer was the snarl of the chain printer... there are probably generations who have no idea of that sound and are the poorer for it.
But how about a line printer with balanced Stephenson gear?
From 10:50: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KnPBWru2Ecg
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.