>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.
Now did your parents report this incident to their bank?? I have an
eftpos card from the NAB and when my latest card was issued this year
they informed me that I was one of their first customers with a card
with a 00 expiery date. Along with the card was a request that any
problems with the card and its use should be reported to the Y2K
hotline the bank has so that problems can be identified and rectified.
>In our technological age, time dependent microprocessors are fitted to loco
>and railcar engine management systems, signalling and communication
>equipment, ticketing machines and station barriers, power supply, probably
>even vending machines.
>
>On the stroke of midnight on 31 December 1999 what is likely to happen? If
>you travel on a diesel hauled train, what is the guarantee that the engine
>won't shut down and you'll be stuck in the middle of nowhere. Or if you're
>on an electric train that the power cuts off? You bought your ticket
>before getting on the train, but the barriers refuse to budge, thinking
>your ticket is over 100 years old. All the signals go red (hopefully
>they'll do this rather all go green). and everything grinds to a stop. Am
>I being a pessimist or realist - are our railway systems run on chance or
>has some-one done a proper study of these things?
>
I cannot understand why anyone would think that trains, planes,
traffic lights etc would just stop working. IMO the worst that could
happen to these things is they will think it is the wrong day of the
week. I ask you why would a train care if the date is 99 or 00. How
would it know that 00 is a problem date and then decide to just stop
working? Same for planes. Traffic lights however may cause some
problems as I have no doubt that they work by using the date to
calculate the day of the week and thus their cycling. But that won't
make them stop working, but just not properly. Your comments on
ticketing systems being upset may very well be true. As for the
railway signaling system again I ask how would the system know the
date is 'invalid' and just stop working?? Computers are inteligent but
they have no way (unless programed) to decide to stop because they
cannot tell if it is 1900 or 2000!!
Where the Y2K problem comes in is in databases, especialy those used
in the financial system. No doubt you are aware that in the early ages
of computers the machines only gave the date as a two digit code and
the programs to save memory only saved the last two digits of the
date. This could cause problems in interest calculations because
comparisons need to be made between two dates with different century
dates. For the railway and indeed the travel industry in general this
is where the problems could be in their ticketing and checkin systems.
Airlines in particular use programs that date back to the 60's and are
very hard to change. A problem for eg may be caused where I person
books to fly somwhere on say 31st Dec 1999 and return on 2-1-2000. The
system may well throw a wobbly because technicaly the return date is
before the departure date.
Anyway my two bobs worth!
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Ashley Wright, Sydney, soon to be Canberra, Australia
ajwright@ozemail.com.au
www: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~ajwright
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