1983 · Automatic Route Setting · Work 916 of 1,871
The equipment room of a new signal box in Sussex before dawn in summer, four tall cabinets side by side, the first a smooth pale grey-beige door, the second a dark wine-red panel behind glass covered in rows of tiny white lamp points, the third an open rack with glowing orange-red rectangles and toggle switches, the fourth two cream-white disc drives with plain smooth fronts behind tinted covers, in front on a wooden table a train register lying open at a flat angle, its ruled columns empty, a pen across it, through an open doorway a long signalling panel glowing with coloured lines of light above an empty swivel chair.
What it was used for
"George" is the nickname of an electronic automatic route setting machine. According to the Science Museum Group it was made in 1983 at the Railway Test Centre in Derby and installed at Three Bridges signal box, where it controlled 13 km of track: it compared stored timetable and route data with reports from the train describer and set the signals accordingly. Railway Gazette International reported in October 1984 that British Rail had introduced automatic route setting in 2 areas controlled from Three Bridges, with the processor deciding which train takes priority at junctions in order to keep delays small. The requirements specification for it was written by A. J. Annis at British Rail Research in 1981.
What was new
What was characteristic was not automatic route setting as such but its link to the timetable: the processor compared the theoretical and actual positions of trains and decided priority at junctions from that. Routes had been set automatically before - Marchand and Chedeville described in the Revue Générale des Chemins de Fer in 1974 an installation at the Paris-Austerlitz control centre in which the trains triggered their own routes without the intervention of a controller at a fixed position, and J. P. Auclair presented in the same journal in December 1983 a route programmer in which the controller pre-programmed a sequence. According to the Science Museum Group, which calls its origin "complex", the name came from the train register: a signaller would ordinarily write his name beside an entry; nobody was in charge of the machine's decisions, so it was George.
What the sources leave open: No manufacturer is documented; the Science Museum Group says only "made at the Railway Test Centre at Derby". The "world's first system" claim rests on the Science Museum Group alone; the TRID abstract of the 1984 Railway Gazette article does not say it. The journal articles were read through TRID records, not in the original. On the opening of Three Bridges signal box a society page says June 1983 and a simulation wiki April 1978 - not resolvable here.