What were the responsibilities of the wire chief than and now?
fr8tman What were the responsibilities of the wire chief than and now?
Keep railroad owned communications lines operating - call the proper technician to repair problems that were discovered through trouble reports and line testing. On my carrier there is no designated job of 'Wire Chief'
Wire Chief was the first regular (not extra board) job I was able to hold.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
At least where I was, the wire chief began to vanish about the same time as the early fax machines (about the size of a washing machine or dryer) showed up along with all the digital telephone systems. They became "communications supervisors" and nobody was needed to babysit the system 24 hours a day (insert Maytag Repairman schtick here).
Now if the dispatchers and operating bubbas get lonely, they just call the guy's phone and invite him (Whine) to come in.
With open wire stretching for miles along the track, the WC had to know how to use measurement test equipment to try to determine where a line was down or shorted to reduce the time spent by the maintainer to find the problem. A good WC could usually get it to within a mile or so. He (I'd be very suprised if there were any women) might be able to patch around it using other pairs but if a tree had come down and the whole pole line down, dispatching was difficult. He would use what info he got from the operators and train crews, and track people. The job came from the days of the telegraph before A.G. Bell and all you could do was measre the resistance of the line. Today they have radar like distance measuring devices to determine where opens, shorts, and other problems are on lines. But I suspect that few railroads have any open wire circuits today. All leased or Fibre Optic or Microwave. A century ago it was an art. They also had to know how circuits worked and were powered.
Back when Electrical Engineers were real Engineers, not just "Bit Pushers" !!
from the Far East of the Sunset Route
(In the shadow of the Huey P Long bridge)
Today with fiber optics, the testers can tell down to a pretty tight tolerance where the problem is. Heck, they can see where the splices are...
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...
But when you are dealing with 3rd party vendors - as happens in many railroad communications links - when the trouble happens each of the parties involved begin pointing their fingers at each other claiming it is the other party's problem. The joy of modern railroad communications.
Mario's posts about the Talgos seem to show much open wire.
BaltACD But when you are dealing with 3rd party vendors - as happens in many railroad communications links - when the trouble happens each of the parties involved begin pointing their fingers at each other claiming it is the other party's problem. The joy of modern railroad communications.
We have relatively little service provided by "3rd party vendors". A lot of our sites do have cell backup, and possibly a T1 providing comms to the site (as well as some satellite), but most everything is on our private ip based microwave radio system. That system supports CTC, dispatch radio, phone, lan, PTC (VETMS), etc. From our mainline microwave sites, we often have a shot that feeds a yard or railroad facility. That is speaking strictly for the railroad that I am employed with.
As some communications techs' like to say, "Troubles leaving here fine"
I also had a two year fight with my cable provider (Comcast) over intermittent ten second interuptions to service where the voice and picture would drop (digital sets would tile) and return. This was affecting an area of about two square miles. They kept wanting to send somebody to the house, and after that they would get a line tech who would change coaxial amplifiers but it kept occuring. After two years, a tenacious good line tech finally realized that it had to be upstream and started checking the Fiber Optics and found a spurring defective laser. No one wanted to think the problem could be in the F.O. system and not in the coaxial cable.
JC UPTON Back when Electrical Engineers were real Engineers, not just "Bit Pushers" !!
We called it "shoving electrons" in those days. Nowadays, with glass overtaking copper, it's "shoving photons" but you still need electrons to get them going.
Just the kinds of troubles - and responses I was referring to in my previous post. Whenever you have to deal with a 'vendor' their response will be - it's YOUR problem, not ours.
All three times I visited San Diego, it was "summer" & we FROZE TO DEATH!!!
csmith9474Ah, gotcha. I was just speaking from our perspective. If we ain't doing our job, trains don't move and you have unhappy dispatchers.
Not saying that anyone isn't doing their jobs. It's just that in doing their jobs they tend to blame the other party for the problem - and then the problem gets fixed and none of the parties will admit it was their fault.
BaltACD It's just that in doing their jobs they tend to blame the other party for the problem - and then the problem gets fixed and none of the parties will admit it was their fault.
I know exactly what you mean. Over 50 years ago I was working at a mainframe computer site that communicated with remote terminals all over the state. It was a running joke that everytime we reported a problem with a line, the phone company called back to say that they didn't find any problem, but the line mysteriously started working again.
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"A stranger's just a friend you ain't met yet." --- Dave Gardner
Oh, you are not the only one with that experience. With POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) techs could get by with taping onto a working phone line but with data, which was active, it would cause errors until they got off it.
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