Re: Martin Place Indicators

[matthew@mail.usyd.edu.au (Matthew Geier)]

In article <bp003.13$8s2.124@ozemail!ozemail.com.au>,
Chris Lehmann <chrisjl@iname.com> wrote:
>
>David Johnson wrote in message <374039A7.D89168EA@ozemail.com.au>...
>>I saw the new indicators at Martin Place, and I am quite impressed.  They
>are
>>very clear to see.  I have two complaints:
>>
>>1)  They still think Erskineville and St Peters are on the Illawarra line,
>so
>>the all stations to Hurstville train described as "Limited Stops" when it
>should
>>really read "All Stations"
>
>
>Not being a person to challenge the authority of a City Rail guard I would
>think that Erskineville and St Peters are actually on the Illawarra line but
>Illawarra line trains don't stop at those stations.

 Illawarra trains have NOT stopped at those two stations for years, you
might as well rip out the platforms.
 Says all stops for the local service does make far more sense to me.

>>2) The time runs off an (incredibly reliable and deadly accurate) computer
>>clock, so the time is never really 100% accurate.  Unfortunately, the clock
>is
>>over 20 seconds slow as of today, so late running passengers think that the
>>train is leaving early. (This is a problem with all the new SPIs that link
>to a
>>computer clock).
>>
>ALL computer clocks that I have seen aren't very accurate.  They need to be
>reset regularly to the correct time.  Perhaps the staff responsible for
>these indicators should look at regularly resetting their clocks.

 The Martin Place control room now has 3 PCs in it. One of them is connected
to the state rail internal network as it is running a Java applet in Netscape
showing the location of all trains in the Sydney box control area.
 Now if they can get them selves organised to run the train describer, DVA and
the indidicators from the ONE PC, or at least network them together, a
machine sitting in the central control room for the Sydney network can have
a GPS or radio clock attached and the entire network of train describers, DVAs
and indicator PCs can use NTP to keep their system clocks all in sync and
accurate. It would be trival to implement once the fact that the train desciber
probably belongs to network control and the DVA and indicators belong to
Cityrail and are seperate supply contracts.... :-)