Thursday 4th March 2021 saw another healthy turn out of industry experts and engineers, for the 'virtual' March technical meeting of the York Section of the Institution of Railway Signal Engineers (IRSE). The presentation was undertaken by Grace Nodes, Product Safety Manager, and Ian Allison, Business Development Director from Park Signalling Ltd on the subject of “The SSI Technician's Terminal - A Journey”.
Grace and Ian presented this history of the Technician’s Terminal products from its humble beginnings. The SSI Technician’s Terminal journey started in the late 1970’s as a key component of the SSI tripartite development consisting of British Rail Research, GEC and Westinghouse. Alan Cribbens, who can be considered the father of SSI, had been working on the idea of an electronic interlocking system from 1977. It was realised early on that a helpful and powerful diagnostic system could make or break SSI. Don Newing was entrusted to lead this part of the development.
It was recognised back in the 1980s when the British Rail Solid State Interlocking (SSI) was under development, that a Technician’s Terminal (TT) was going to be a feature of the system from the start. SSI became a hugely successful product in quantity production for more than thirty years. While SSI has been superseded by modern equivalents for new installations, several hundred interlockings remain in service around the world.
An essential component of any electronic signalling system is the facility for a maintainer to monitor operations. This allows the maintainer to diagnose faults within the system and the connected equipment. It should be able to apply restrictive controls such as barring of routes or maintaining signals in their most restrictive aspects. However, obsolescence of the commercial off the shelf (COTS) components used to build the SSI TT is an ongoing threat to continued operation of these systems.
The MT04 has been developed over several years using standard Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components and is directly compatible, replicating the feel and functionality of all original and existing equipment. Additionally, USB pen drives have been provided for event logging and event data recovery in a controlled manner.
Thank you to the IRSE York Section for their welcome to their meeting.
To read more about the Technician's Terminal, click here.
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