Symbolic Forest

More notes on the Lambrigg and/or Grayrigg train crash from a couple of weeks ago. Continued from here.

As I said in the first part, it was known for many years that junctions are a dangerous thing. Any place where a train has a choice of routes to take is a danger point, and the railways, for a hundred years or so, got around this by avoiding them as much as possible. A freight train, going into a siding, would have to run past it, stop, and back up slowly into the siding.

This is a very safe and careful thing to do, but it is very, very slow. Trains take a long time to slow down, and a long time to stop. Backing up has to be done very slowly, too, and the whole operation blocks the main line for rather a long time. If the train could run directly into the siding, things would be a lot faster.

Similarly, if one line of a pair has to be closed for engineering works, trains have to run in both directions over the remaining line. The old way of doing this was very slow indeed – the train would have to stop, reverse backwards onto the other track, then reverse again so it was going forwards. All very fiddly and slow,^* and it would have been easier if there was a faster way to do things.^**

So, in the 1960s and 1970s, an awful lot of the rail network got simplified and redesigned. In particular, “emergency crossovers,” like the ones involved in the Lambrigg crash, were installed every few miles on the main lines. Essentially, all they were there to do was let trains switch across to the other track if one line had to be closed for maintenance. This, though, meant greatly increasing the numbers of relatively dangerous, maintenance-heavy facing points on high-speed main lines. Cost was no longer so much of an issue – greater automation and mechanisation of the railways meant that all points were fitted with exactly the same locking equipment, so the legally-required and previously expensive locks on facing points were now provided for free. Maintenance still mattered, though.

Note that I said “relatively dangerous”. Facing points are maintenance-heavy, purely because they are intrinsically more dangerous than trailing points. This isn’t an issue, though, so long as the maintenance gets done. And, over the years, all points started to be given the same level of maintenance – there is in many ways no longer a distinction between facing and trailing points, maintenance-wise, because as I said above they nearly all have the same fittings.

So long as the maintenance gets done. That is the key. Railways just aren’t maintained in the same way that they used to be. There’s no longer a man walking every stretch of track, every day of the year, looking out for faults, like there used to be. If facing points aren’t maintained properly, they become dangerous, and they’re likely to cause accidents, such as Lambrigg and Potters Bar. The problem is, they’re vital to being able to run the railway smoothly and flexibly. If you want to run a flexible railway, it’s going to cost you more. You have to be willing to pay the price, however you want to pay it.

* there are lots of other rules involving people waving flags and people whose job is just to be unique, but I won’t bore you with them.

** This has nothing to do with the closing of alternative routes, incidentally, which people sometimes go on about as being a Bad Thing in connection with the rail network. Alternative routes are often a lot less useful than people think.

Keyword noise: accident, crash, derailment, facing point lock, facing points, FPL, flexibility, Grayrigg, history, junctions, Lambrigg, maintenance, points, Potters Bar, preventative maintenance, railway, railway history, signalling, shunting, trains.

We managed to be awfully productive yesterday. We’d gone to bed fairly early on Saturday night,^* so got up bright and early on Sunday morning. We were having breakfast in town when the streets were still deserted, and were wandering around shopping in almost-empty shops. We even managed to get all H’s grocery shopping done, get back home, feel like we’d used up a full day’s energy, and it was still only one o’clock. A whole half-a-day left to do productive things, creative things, imaginative things, limited only by our own imaginations.

So, of course, we lazed around on the sofa and ambled around the internet all afternoon instead. Hurrah!

* after a rather nice Indian meal at a restaurant on Chants Ave.

Keyword noise: efficiency, Hull, shopping, weekend.

Two things struck me about the coverage yesterday of Patricia Tabram‘s drugs conviction. Tabram, in case you didn’t see the news, is the Northumberland woman convicted of growing cannabis for medical reasons. She likes to claim that her conviction is part of a grand struggle for rights, like the right of everyone to vote, which is over-egging her pudding a little. She’s certainly been using her conviction as part of a broad political campaign,^* but that’s about as far as the similarities go.

Anyway, interviewed on Radio 4 last night, she said something along the lines of: cannabis is good medicine because it’s natural. Prescription drugs are not because they’re full of chemicals.^** Which, of course, is a load of nonsense. Some people like to use the word “chemicals” as if it’s some dark, lurking evil, and like to imply that anything grown on a plant is healthy and implicitly Good For You. Despite this, you rarely find them tucking into a nice meal of potato fruit and yew seeds.^*** How many different chemicals are in your average pill? A handful. How many different chemicals are in a marijuana leaf? Thousands.

Tabram also said that prescription medicine made her feel suicidal, but cannabis had no side-effects at all. That’s her experience, though. Everyone has different side-effects to any sort of drug, “natural” or otherwise; I’ve known several people who have had bad psychological reactions to cannabis. It may be relatively innocuous, but just because you’re fine with it doesn’t mean the person next to you will be. The plural of “anecdote” is not “data”.

* Standing against Peter Hain at the last general election, appearing on the telly a lot, trying to get people to call her “the cannabis gran”, that sort of thing. I had second thoughts about mentioning her here, because I don’t like giving publicity to publicity-seekers, but frankly this blog is a drop in the ocean.

** Not her exact words, but that was the message she was trying to give.

*** I shouldn’t need to say this, but potato fruit are rather poisonous, and yew seeds are very poisonous indeed.

Keyword noise: BBC, cannabis, chemicals, conviction, drugs, fallacy, herbal medicine, marijuana, medicine, natural, Patricia Tabram, publicity, radio, side effects.

I felt quite ill last night, and wrote a blog post in a delirious haze which absolutely no sense at all, which is why it’s since been deleted. As to why I felt quite so ill, I’m not entirely sure. But I’m blaming the stench.

I came home last night, and the first thing to do was feed the cat. So, of course, I go to the cupboard, and find a rather inflated packet of cat food. Not a good sign.

The only thing to do, though, was to move it. And as soon as I took it out of the cupboard, the stench hit me.

Now, some people have smelled horrible smells. Some people work in stenching plants,^* or fish factories. I’ve smelled our reception after people from the local fish plants have popped by, and they don’t leave a very good smell behind them. Some people have smelled sewage works, week-old battlefields, rotting seaweed, and many other horrible things. But all these people, when they smell the smell of a rotting pouch of cat food, so rotted it has inflated, would say: “bloody hell, that smells bad.”

It smells awful. It smells disgusting. It turned my stomach. I still felt nauseous several hours later, and there’s still a tinge of it about the kitchen.

The cat, sensibly, fled, and didn’t come back until morning.

* the places where they add the “gas smell” to gas, so that you can smell it when there’s a gas leak. Gas fresh out of the ground doesn’t smell of anything at all, and the concentrated liquid that gets added to produce the smell smells, I imagine, vile.

Keyword noise: The Cat, cat food, off, rotting, smell, stench.

Not much has been happening to me this week. Which is possibly the wrong way of looking at things: just the same number of heartbeats have happened, but for some reason I haven’t thought them notable. Maybe I’m not paying enough attention to them.

The other night we settled down to watch a retro-Doctor Who series, from the Tom Baker era,^* and reading the back of the box I realised that the first episode was originally broadcast on the day I was born. Strangely, it made me feel suddenly younger.

** The Invasion Of Time, if you were wondering

Keyword noise: Doctor Who, quiet, television, The Invasion Of Time, Tom Baker.

The shredder didn’t go anywhere, in the end. Before anyone could lift it, the branch office phoned up and said: “don’t throw it away! Fix it!” I explained it was unfixable, by me at any rate. So, they phoned up the Office Secretary and said: “don’t let them throw it away! Find someone competent to fix it!” The Office Secretary told them to stop being silly, and started shopping for a replacement, before throwing the broken one out in a sensible, unimaginative fashion. I was mildly disappointed.

Keyword noise: appliance, disposal, recycling, repairs, rubbish, shredder.

Some notes on the Lambrigg rail accident (also known as the Grayrigg crash in the media).

Facing points are a bad thing. Facing points have always been known to be a bad thing. This has been known ever since the railways were first created.

A facing point is, essentially, a junction, where one line of rails splits in to two. The opposite is a trailing point: a junction where two lines come together to become one. You will quickly realise that a facing point becomes a trailing point if you stop your train and reverse it, and vice-versa.

Facing points are dangerous; trailing points are safe. You can drive through a faulty trailing point, or a trailing point set the wrong way, and you’re unlikely to have your train come off the track. You’ll probably wreck the point, unless it’s designed for you to do that to it,^* but your train will be unharmed. Do that with a faulty facing point and your train is going to end up all over the place.

Now, this was never a problem, because for years main-line railways only ever had tracks in pairs, one track for each direction. Going the Wrong Way was strictly against the rules. The main reason for this was to stop trains meeting head-on, but it had a secondary benefit: it meant that engineers could get rid of as many facing points as was possible. This was partly an expense issue. Anyone who’s ever had a train set will know that if you switch a facing point whilst a train is on it, Bad Things will happen as different parts of the train try to go in different directions. This isn’t what happened at Lambrigg/Grayrigg, but it has the same result; and when the government realised, they quickly insisted that all facing points be fitted with a complex arrangement of locks and train-detectors to make sure you can’t do that. Back then, that involved mechanical locks which needed a lot of careful and regular maintenance and adjustment. Now, most of it is done electrically, but there is still a mechanical lock somewhere in the point’s machine that holds the various moving parts of a point fast when a train is nearby. Of course, that’s only any use when the rest of the point is mechanically sound too.

So, anyway, as I said, if all lines are one-way only you don’t need facing points. Not until you get to big junctions, at any rate, where you have to live with them. Freight lines didn’t need the expensive facing point locks, so freight trains always backed into sidings. And the railways happily ran like that for a hundred years or so, and facing points rarely caused accidents. In modern times, though, it didn’t really work.

*The second part of this article continues here*

* Lots of points on rural lines, nowadays, are what’s called “sprung points”. They’re not controlled, they just sit there. Use them as a facing point, and they’ll always send you the same way.^** Use them as a trailing point, and you can approach them from either route without problems.

** Left, usually, on British main line railways at any rate.

Keyword noise: accident, crash, derailment, facing point lock, facing points, FPL, Grayrigg, history, Lambrigg, points, railway, railway history, signalling, trains.

I have been wrestling with a shredder.

A dead shredder, not a switched-on one—that would be silly. Wrestling with a dead shredder gave me at least a fighting chance of not having my fingers chewed off.

It was all the fault of the branch office staff over in Another Part Of The Forest. Their shredder was dead, making horrible noises, they’d tried oiling it, nothing was working. So, it turned up in Room 3B (IT Office) for me to deal with. I took it apart, scattering chaff all over my desk. I pulled chunks of oily paper from the jammed-up cutters. I dragged a length of plastic, of some kind, from between them: possibly the remains of a comb binding, or the banding you get on boxes of fresh paper.^* I picked out all the paper I could see with tweezers, and made a minor blood-sacrifice with my fingers. But nothing would bring it back to life.

Which itself raised a problem. How do you dispose of an office shredder? We’ve tried putting things like that in our office skip before: it generated irate skip-collectors. They’re a bit big for the waste paper basket. So I came up with a plan. I drew up a sign. “Valuable! Do not throw out!” and stuck it onto the side of the shredder, before parking the shredder in Reception, by the door. With any luck it’ll be gone tomorrow. I’ll let you know how we get on.

* “Oh no,” said the manager from Another Part Of The Forest on the phone later, “we’d never put any sort of plastic through it!”

Keyword noise: appliance, disposal, recycling, repairs, rubbish, shredder, trash.

Legal news of the week: Microsoft has lost a patent infringement case brought by Alcatel, the company that owns the rights to the MP3. That is, they don’t own the file format itself, but they own the patent on understanding what they mean.

Now, normally, “Microsoft losing a court case” would be Good News for computer users everywhere, because Microsoft generally aren’t a very nice company and seem to spend most of their time thinking up new ways to extract money from people.^* This case isn’t, though, because software patents are a bad thing, a bad thing indeed. If you’re a geek you can skip this next bit, because you’ll already know why they’re a bad thing.

Software is, basically, a list of instructions for doing arithmetic. Forget all the flashy graphics you see on the screen. Forget your email and your IM programs. Computers are machines for pushing numbers around,^** and computer software is a list of instructions for doing that. Remember doing long division at school? That was essentially a list of steps for working out division sums that are too hard to do in your head – software for your brain, in other words.

Now, imagine if the inventor of long division^*** had patented it. Every time you did a long division sum, you’d have to pay him a royalty. If you invented a machine to do long divisions for you, you’d have to pay a bloody big royalty. That’s how patents work.

Software patents are even worse, because often they involve access to data which is otherwise locked up. All those MP3 files on your computer? There’s no practical use for them without decoding software. Decoding software is patented. Microsoft thought they’d paid the patent holders for the right to write a decoder and sell it with Windows – but then the patent holder changed, and the new owner thought otherwise. The courts agreed with them.

Imagine if the first person who ever thought of the idea of reading a book in the bath had patented it. They managed to get a patent on the following: “run bath, select book, get in bath, pick up book, hold book in a cunning way to avoid getting it wet, read.” That’s no different, essentially, from a software patent that involves reading data from a file. If someone had done that, then you could only read a book in the bath if you’d licensed the right to do so. That’s why software patents are bad and wrong.

In more amusing legal news, the right-wing UK Independence Party has been told to return over £350,000 in illegal donations, made by a businessman who wasn’t registered to vote at the time. The party think the ruling is ridiculous. It shines a light, though, on the underside of their philosophy. There are rules there to ensure that only British people with a stake in British politics can fund political parties. UKIP think the ruling is silly because the man is obviously British even though he couldn’t prove he was a British voter. Which just goes to show that they’re not interested in proof or evidence or process; their definition of Britishness seems to be that you’re Someone Like Us.

* which, to be fair, is what capitalist companies are supposed to do.

** that’s why they’re called “computers”, and not “communicators” or “info-readers”, despite that being their main use.

*** apparently the sixteenth-century Yorkshire mathematician Henry Briggs, according to this lecture from his old college

Keyword noise: Alcatel, audio, donations, file formats, Microsoft, MP3, music, software, software patent, UKIP.

At the office, we often get random pieces of promotional crap sent to us by companies touting for business. The best so far: an “emergency phone kit” from O2.^* The latest: a pen from Openreach. If you’ve not heard of Openreach yet: they’re the chunk of British Telecom that actually gets to play with wiring and hardware, and ends up doing all the manual work.

Openreach’s PR people clearly aren’t as imaginative as O2’s, because they’ve sent us a ballpoint pen. One of those pens with a moving picture inside, that slides from one end to the other when the pen’s tilted. Rather than go for the classic “woman whose bra and knickers disappear” design, their pen has a background of terraced houses, and an Openreach van chugging from one end to the other.

So far, so boring. This pen, though, is ideal to represent BT.^** Because of the speed the van moves: chug chug chug, dead slow along the line of houses. Perfectly representing the speed it takes BT to do pretty much anything.^*** Ideal publicity material!

* A piece of string, and a capped cardboard tube marked with a “cut here” line around the middle.

** Or, “Openreach, a part of the BT group”, as it says on their promotional bumpf

*** To be honest, I have found one part of BT that does what you ask, quickly, and gets it right first time: whatever office it is sets up reverse DNS information for ADSL lines with static IP addresses. If you do not know what this means, rest assured you will never need to get in touch with them. Oh, and if you know anyone who works for BT: they have a special staff-only customer service number which allegedly gets better service than the ordinary one, and if you have a problem they can call it up on your behalf.

Keyword noise: advertising, British Telecom, BT, junk mail, Openreach.