Hi Roy,


Really well put. One of the questions I often get asked when I talk to school children is "what do you really enjoy about engineering?" Having thought about this quite a lot now (whilst answering those questions) I realised there are two things:

1. The look on customers / clients faces when we give them a solution that is better than they expected,

2. Solving engineering problems which appeared to be impossible (typically due to lack of time or resources - along the lines of the Apollo 13 "square filter in a round hole" problem) - a mix of intellectual satisfaction together with a special case of point 1. 

The technology (and the understanding of that technology) is the means, not the end.


I came across a brilliant, and simple, example of an excellent rail Customer Information System recently on the Oslo suburban network. When we bought tickets from the ticket machine it told us when the next train to that destination was, and which platform it left from. My colleague and I, both of whom had worked in the rail industry for rather a long time, were stunned by this!


(And it didn't present us with a range of standard, off-peak, and super off-peak tickets some or all of which may have been valid or not valid at the time we were travelling. Grrrr....I often think that if I - as a railway geek working in the UK industry - don't understand UK ticketing, how on earth does a visitor to the UK manage???)


Back onto the thread, I often think that a huge change in the industry since I started is that computing power and interconnectivity is now so cheap that the technology rarely seems to limit the solution to problems. As you suggest, understanding the underlying problem that the end user faces is often the clever, and fun, bit.


Talking of which, here is a challenge for anyone - how to get rid of ticket barriers on UK railways. It's been wonderful travelling around various bits of Europe by train this year, and I particularly noticed the joy of no ticket barriers. Meanwhile, back here in the UK, my worst instance was just missing a train at Birmingham New Street because of having to go through two ticket barriers to get from one platform to another - neither of which accepted my, perfectly valid, ticket (for anyone who doesn't know, following the remodelling the station is now split into two halves). On another occasion credit to the platform staff at a station in North London who saw my wife and I running towards the barriers with large suitcases as a train pulled into the platform and heeded my cry of "we really need to get on that train!" and opened them ready for us. What they didn't know was that we'd spent the last 12 hours travelling from the far side of Germany...but I think they could see that I was determined to get on that train one way or another!


We were rather late because we'd had an entertaining fault on the Eurostar, as it went from Belgium into France the emergency brake came on. After a while it was announced that the train thought it had already got to the UK, so it was surprised to find the signalling and power systems seemed to be French, and so it (quite reasonably) shut itself down. My wife, who knew I'd worked on Eurostar systems many years ago said "surely that can't happen?" We then had an interesting (to me ) conversation about software and hardware failures, safety and reliability. When I'd stopped laughing.


Cheers,


Andy

Hi Roy,


Really well put. One of the questions I often get asked when I talk to school children is "what do you really enjoy about engineering?" Having thought about this quite a lot now (whilst answering those questions) I realised there are two things:

1. The look on customers / clients faces when we give them a solution that is better than they expected,

2. Solving engineering problems which appeared to be impossible (typically due to lack of time or resources - along the lines of the Apollo 13 "square filter in a round hole" problem) - a mix of intellectual satisfaction together with a special case of point 1. 

The technology (and the understanding of that technology) is the means, not the end.


I came across a brilliant, and simple, example of an excellent rail Customer Information System recently on the Oslo suburban network. When we bought tickets from the ticket machine it told us when the next train to that destination was, and which platform it left from. My colleague and I, both of whom had worked in the rail industry for rather a long time, were stunned by this!


(And it didn't present us with a range of standard, off-peak, and super off-peak tickets some or all of which may have been valid or not valid at the time we were travelling. Grrrr....I often think that if I - as a railway geek working in the UK industry - don't understand UK ticketing, how on earth does a visitor to the UK manage???)


Back onto the thread, I often think that a huge change in the industry since I started is that computing power and interconnectivity is now so cheap that the technology rarely seems to limit the solution to problems. As you suggest, understanding the underlying problem that the end user faces is often the clever, and fun, bit.


Talking of which, here is a challenge for anyone - how to get rid of ticket barriers on UK railways. It's been wonderful travelling around various bits of Europe by train this year, and I particularly noticed the joy of no ticket barriers. Meanwhile, back here in the UK, my worst instance was just missing a train at Birmingham New Street because of having to go through two ticket barriers to get from one platform to another - neither of which accepted my, perfectly valid, ticket (for anyone who doesn't know, following the remodelling the station is now split into two halves). On another occasion credit to the platform staff at a station in North London who saw my wife and I running towards the barriers with large suitcases as a train pulled into the platform and heeded my cry of "we really need to get on that train!" and opened them ready for us. What they didn't know was that we'd spent the last 12 hours travelling from the far side of Germany...but I think they could see that I was determined to get on that train one way or another!


We were rather late because we'd had an entertaining fault on the Eurostar, as it went from Belgium into France the emergency brake came on. After a while it was announced that the train thought it had already got to the UK, so it was surprised to find the signalling and power systems seemed to be French, and so it (quite reasonably) shut itself down. My wife, who knew I'd worked on Eurostar systems many years ago said "surely that can't happen?" We then had an interesting (to me ) conversation about software and hardware failures, safety and reliability. When I'd stopped laughing.


Cheers,


Andy