I thought I had better check in and show that I havent had a nasty accident (or even worse)...I'm feeling quite guilty seeing DruffMan with his loyal sidekick Bondyn (The Boy Wonder) keeping the blog ticking over.
So this is what I've been working on (And no, its not the control panel for his Paekak layout):
This is the new "Auckland" desk in Train Control, which will be the heart of the new room controlling the entire Auckland Metro area. Over the next 6-9 months, 3 more desks will take over the roles of the current Britomart, Otahuhu and Papakura boxes.
So, what are you actually looking at here? Going across the left, the first two screens on the top have screen shots of the soon to be delivered WestCAD system, put there as a gag but I didnt have the heart to take them down...in fact, I even moved them around once or twice. The two screens below them were repeaters for the Britomart box showing Britomart down as far as Newmarket and Tamaki, but Tim (in a starring role here) took them off...The next four screens are the CTC screens for the Central, Northern and ECMT areas. Then carrying along the top you have the Radio PC (Showing 5 acknowledged conversations in yellow and vigilance alarm in blue), followed by the Track Warrant PC (mostly for the North Auckland line at this time on a Saturday). The bottom 2 screens are the work PC, with OMS (the GUI front end for Amicus) on the left and the phone software on the right.
All the screens are 22", but the middle 5 will be replaced (much to our chagrin) by 24" screens once the new signaling system arrives. As an interesting aside, on a desk this size it actually works better to "dumb down" the resolution on the bigger screens so they can be read from a distance at a glance....I think I left most of them running at the good old 1024 x 768.
Sorry, realising I'm babbling a bit, so heres another pic showing the Britomart Screens on top before Tim started reorganising things...
Theres been a lot of interested people wandering through during the day (seeing as most people were in for derailments, slips, or both)....and apart from some unhelpful comments from a senior manager ("Call that a panel, Lad? Back in my day we had panels taking up entire rooms...had to take pack lunch to walk from one end t'other...") reaction has been positive.
Now to fix the bugs (that sounds like its Sundays job...)
1 comment:
my wife ( who gets easily confused and thinks that "motorised dandruff" is a silly name for a blog!) was recently interrogating me over comments i had made about running my layouts like the real thing and using a laptop in the train room to run decoder and panel pro,etc. BUT!! why do you need wireless internet access she demanded! because of updates i replied too quickly and probably in the wrong tone of voice. well she said, i think this is all because of you spending too much time looking at THAT site!! I rest my case.
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