Re: Railways and the Millennium Bug

David Bromage (dbromage@metz.une.edu.au)
29 Apr 1998 02:00:29 GMT

David Bennetts (davibenn@pcug.org.au) wrote:
>A small incident experienced by my parents travelling on the Countrylink
>Xplorer service from Canberra to Sydney yesterday makes me wonder whether
>the Railways are ready to enter the year 2000 without major disruptions
>occurring. On attempting to use the onboard payphone with a credit card
>with an '00' expiry date, the phone informed them their card was out of
>date and refused to operate. Another passenger attempting to use the phone
>met with the same result. OK, the phone is maintained by a contractor, but
>so is virtually every else (or soon will be) in this wonderful era of
>privatisation.

That would be a problem with Paytel rather than Countrylink, however I
take your point. Westrail's Web site has quite a large section on how they
are dealing with the Y2K bug (new software and the like).

I'm sure the more recent GE units with their computer control have already
thought of this. Not sure if the older Dash-7 or Dash-8 units will have a
problem. Does anybody know if VicTrack worked the Y2K problem into SAW?

Cheers
David