Most European railways require a driver to have done some route familiarization for most routes, which tends to work fairly well. What does not work very well is that the UK has very patchy and antiquated train safety systems (AWS / TPWS are somewhat rudimentary and deployed - by far - not everywhere) and signaling. Even speed restrictions in the UK are placed very, very tightly and you better know them by heart because they didn't get placed with the idea that the driver must have sufficient time to reduce speed / react between where they get a warning signal and where the restriction comes into effect.
I suspect the move from public to private ownership did adversely affect the upgrades of those, as well as electrification on several key routes.
If I remember correctly they do not even have something as basic as an electronic coursebook - which became mandatory in Germany in the 90s already. And at least in NL if you have a set of routes in a certain direction / route set - drivers would get route familiarization both for the main routes and for the bypasses.
It's pretty much global fwiw. I wrote route qualification software for places outside of Europe.
It should also be made clear that you don't need to get an actual qualification from a bureaucratic org. You basically just need to document the last time the driver drove the route with another qualified driver and then document that they've kept the qualification up to date. It's a documentation process and just not that onerous. Also absolutely required for any railway since trains don't stop or accelerate quickly. You need the drivers to know what's coming ahead and no amount of signage or signalling can beat knowing the route.
The only concern i have is the guard qualification. That does seem overboard but... i don't know the UK and chances are there's nuance to this. So i'd have concern with anyone reading GPs post and thinking this is the cause of UKs railway inefficiency.
> AWS / TPWS are somewhat rudimentary and deployed - by far - not everywhere
I don't think that's quite true. AWS is rudimentary, true (only forces acknowledgement of warning signals, but otherwise no speed supervision, braking curves or trainstop functionality), but AFAIK deployed almost everywhere, the only major exception I'm aware of being some complex but slow-speed station layouts.
And TPWS… while it doesn't do everything that a truly modern train protection system could do, together with the British practice of long enough overlaps (i.e. an additional safety distance beyond a stop signal that needs to be kept clear, too, in case of an overrun) it's still quite reasonably effective at preventing dangerous overruns. And its deployment has been indeed more gappy, but AFAIK junctions and major speed restrictions, where the biggest risks are, are still quite comprehensively fitted. The biggest gap are automatic signals on the plain line, but then again there haven't been many accidents at those.
> If I remember correctly they do not even have something as basic as an electronic coursebook - which became mandatory in Germany in the 90s already.
Part of that goes a long way back. One of the most fundamental differences is that the UK still does route signalling, whereas Germany completely switched to speed signalling at the beginning of the 1930s.
Route signalling means that the signals indicate the route the train will take, but not the exact speed, so if you want trains to operate safely but without excessive dawdling, route knowledge is a must.
Whereas with speed signalling, the signals directly indicate the safe speed for proceeding, so route knowledge, while still useful and necessary for other purposes, is no longer quite as crucially relevant. Consequently, in the UK ad-hoc diversions without route knowledge are quite taboo, whereas in Germany, emergency diversions due to short-notice incidents are mostly (except for some specific lines with more complex requirements) allowed, albeit with a speed restriction of 100 km/h.
That is an interesting difference. Also, from what I know, the German signaling is configured in such a way that there always be sufficient braking distance between signals - including speed reductions, whereas if you look at how tightly the UK speed signs are placed it seems that they do not give any "warning", they state the fact - and you better be prepared.
It does seem like it - with the addition of "one sentence per paragraph", which - outside of its LinkedIn format - feels like yelling. This format doesn't incite trust in the person advising (let alone the tone).
...by the passing of which the name of the game will be to find another vehicle for occluding reality and creating optics. Something to replace "bets" with "shaping" and "appetite", for example.
Connecting effort and outcome is hard as orgs get bigger, and a lot (a LOT) of those strategies have to do with optics and the "sponsors" being "on the wave" at the moment (trusted by owners/board). While it is not realistic to say "we do the work until it works and costs be damned" some tools for this are required, and I would say putting out a "bet horizon" of a year or a quarter is setting up some nice political battles in the future.
Thanks. Re “scoop” as I said, I wouldn’t swear to any of this on the stand and it certainly doesn’t meet journalistic standards. Consider it opinion piece/color commentary.
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That said both the person this time and people before who allegedly signed onto DHH’s nonsense I’m incredibly disappointed in. Most of them I considered at the least collegial acquaintances and some of them friends. So I felt like I knew them at least well enough to say they were above his sort of divisive rhetoric. But people frequently disappoint.
Maybe I have it all wrong and André, REDACTED, and REDACTED* have done something awful or something…. but from what I know of their characters I seriously doubt it.
Of course, IDK what the DHH crowd is actually thinking, if any of this is true, since in that case they don’t exactly discuss this openly, purely dealing in backroom shenanigans that one could almost think verged on collusion and that leads some groups like RC to possibly violate contract and employment law (at the very least copyright if you check who actually has the copyright on some of the stuff they distribute…). That is if any of the things people are saying is true.
But hey, Rubyists are all “nice” right? Nobody says ethical or kind was a requirement.
* There’s at least two people that I kno- err that is that I strongly suspect, have been tarred by mere association with André. I have a theory it’s more than just them. Apparently he’s insidious about leaking liberal labor thoughts like people should get paid enough to support their families in expensive tech hubs, even if they are working on open source. But apparently “professional open source maintainer” is anathema to some people’s vision and they’d prefer everything to depend on volunteer labor only. Which is a position multi-millionaires who successfully monetized that volunteer labor could take, sure. But it’d make them hypocrites, in the worst of ways. Especially since their alleged actions are leading to some of said maintainers losing work doing so, but they supposedly seem okay with funding others. At that point it stops being a logical, if unethical platform, and more personal spite?
* Get appointed as paid managers of a non-profit
* Get advice from legal
* Legal suggests removing long-term maintainers without liability contract the same way people get fired: immediately and instantly, and screw the consequences. "Open-source? Never heard of it. Protect your entity legally"
* Instantly follow the advice of the lawyers to the letter.
I have used Base quite a bit in the past but switched to SQLitePro as Base was quite crash-happy (and I never managed to understand why). Might give it a second try since it seems the Base development is progressing, while SQLitePro is stagnating.
Slit scan photography is very cool. And bonus points for making trains the subject matter! Fun fact: back in the day some acquaintances of mine actually made some photos with a flatbed scanner, utilizing its moving head as a slit aperture - was a neat project.
I have regretted releasing OSS under the umbrella of employers, and will likely not do so in the future. And while I never regretted releasing OSS as such, I did often have regrets that while I know the software was better than what was currently available in the market, me being bad at marketing meant that it would still not get any use.
I get the point, but on mobile devices especially it is vastly more pleasant to read a decently-formatted HTML email with a dash of responsive design, for font sizing for example. And showing some text and a "Download PDF" widget - to find a PDF with exactly the same content - can actually be infuriating, because you would expect that the PDF would contain something _in addition_ to the plain text.
Yeah text only pdf that repeats email content is a bit of a fail.
Though so much of the web has moved to accommodate modern smart phones - I'm not against it, the web should still accommodate those who just won't bother to set their email client to display html elements in emails - perhaps something this tool could additionally provide - include a simple block of text half decently formatted with the same info for those who prefer it that way.
I suspect the move from public to private ownership did adversely affect the upgrades of those, as well as electrification on several key routes.
If I remember correctly they do not even have something as basic as an electronic coursebook - which became mandatory in Germany in the 90s already. And at least in NL if you have a set of routes in a certain direction / route set - drivers would get route familiarization both for the main routes and for the bypasses.
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