>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
The banks have apparently started waging war against 3rd party credit
validation equipment suppliers who havent fixed this. Visa and Mastercard
are waging war on Banks that havent fixed it. There will be shops that
refuse to accept your card due to their credit terminals not being updated,
and some shops wont update, they dont want to pay for it themselves.
>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.
It is now quite amazing what sort of equipment is date aware. The type of
failure is varied however. The locomotive with the computer data logger may
just stop logging and calling into base. The actual EFI system will continue
to work fine.
The engine management system might just fail for hours after the change,
as that is the short term history it keeps to operate. Windows of failure
have been found to be as small as several seconds to minutes, hours days
or perminant failure!.
Your train could come to a screaming halt 5 to midnight, and restart it
self fine at 5 past.
Support computers (other than dataloggers) tend to be more interested in
relative time, and over small periods.
Signaling logic wouldnt tend to have date dependancies, but the control
room might. It is quite possible that the main signal box train describer
would crash, leaving no control of the signals on the ground. The in the
field signals would fail over to automatic or stop.
State Rail is still rather dependant on route setting computer logic
implemented on DEC PDP11 systems. Such a control system is a prime canditate
for failure. Its old, contains much hard to maintain code, and likely to be
still in use due to no funds available to replace it. It doesnt however
perform any safety task, it just instructs the interlocking what to do. The
safety interlocks are in logic, not software.
The new 'software based' interlockings installed in the country areas could
be interesting, but the traffic density is low, the scope for disaster is some
what lower.
Vending machines and ticket checking barriers and the like are more likely
to suffer complete failures as they would tend to deal in absolute dates.