Classic freight rail system showcases 50-year-old innovation
Fifty years in the past, three IBM System 370 mainframes powered a pioneering scheduling system run by the UK’s nationwide rail operator, British Rail. Known as Complete Operations Processing System (Tops), when it went stay on twenty seventh October 1975, the system revolutionised the management of all rail freight operations throughout Britain on-line and in actual time.
It used British Rail’s personal phone community and, together with a pair of IBM System 370/168 and a System 370/158 mainframe, Ventek minicomputers with built-in punchcard machines had been put in at each space freight terminal.
In an article printed within the October thirtieth 1973, Laptop Weekly described the system as: “One of the vital intensive and complete freight administration techniques on the planet.”
Commenting on the fiftieth anniversary, Jonathan Aylen, a Tops specialist on the College of Manchester, stated: “Tops lined the entire of the UK, each freight wagon and loco, each prepare motion and each cargo all monitored by a central laptop system at Marylebone in London. The management headquarters was described as ‘house age’ for its day.”
Marylebone housed 32 IBM 3330/33301 Management Information Drives, offering a whooping 3.2Mbytes of storage.
The Laptop Weekly article reported that Tops divided the nation into 152 Tops Duty Areas (TRAs), every with a Ventek 9200 minicomputer system. Describing how the system operated, the Laptop Weekly article famous: “The premise for Tops within the discipline is the punch card, one card for one wagon. As visitors is moved from one TRA to a different, new playing cards exhibiting the modified standing are produced. The receiving officer at an Space Freight Centre (AFC) checks the playing cards in opposition to wagons and feeds this info into the system to replace the database.”
As Aylen famous in The convergence of computing and telecommunications: Chilly Struggle to coal trains paper he co-authored in 2024, the community British Rail used was state-of-the-art for the time, utilizing co-axial cables for the primary trunk line hyperlinks, with 4Mhz analogue transmission (equal to 960 phone channels). Native hyperlinks had been carried on 12 channel frequency division multiplex techniques on balanced copper cable pairs. These gave a high-quality speech path of 4Khz channels to each main station, workplace complicated and freight yard within the nation.
Nevertheless it additionally stretched abroad. Laptop Weekly reported that Ventek minicomputers had been additionally deployed in France at Dunkirk, and there was a Telex hyperlink in Zeebruggee, Belgium. Information from the freight centres was fed into the Marylebone laptop room by way of a information community which spanned 400km.
“Right this moment we take laptop management of enterprise operations without any consideration. However fifty years in the past, it was a revolution to know what was occurring proper throughout the enterprise in actual time, particularly a system which noticed as much as 3,000 freight prepare actions day by day,” Aylen stated.
Tops highlighted the precise demand for wagons, which meant that many had been surplus and offered for scrap, due to this fact decreasing upkeep prices and serving to to pay for the general system.
Bob Gwynne, rail professional, stated: “This had one main unexpected consequence: one scrapyard in South Wales focused on fast and simple wagon disposal. Troublesome steam locos had been put aside for later. This respiratory house led to 213 steam locomotives being acquired for preservation, roughly two-thirds of the whole steam locomotives preserved immediately.
“So, an unintended impact of Tops was the delivery of the heritage railways as a nationwide tourism product, somewhat than the handful of areas that pre-date 1975.”
Many because of The Nationwide Museum of Computing (TNMOC) for offering scans of the unique Laptop Weekly article. The complete Laptop Weekly archive relationship again to September 1966 is held at TNMOC.
