Of computers that do and don't
24th July 2022
To err is human, to muck it up completely...
It has been a bit of a stressful week. I think I can say that without dispute. Not only the heat, though that was bad enough, but additional issues that I could well have done without.
Take Monday. I had a long journey scheduled and needed to be on the road by 2pm and that meant I had the morning free to sort out various orders, etc., which included booking a hotel on line for that evening. I'm not seeking anything fancy, just basic clean accommodation with parking and as usual by choice fell on Premier Inn, and at about 09.30 I booked for Tunbridge (North). Or did I? The screen froze just after the payment bit and nothing I could do would take it forwards, and eventually I had to back out of the program. (You may call it an 'app' if you like, I'll stick to the older term complete with American spelling). I got no confirmatory email from Premier so went on line to the bank and sure enough, the money had been taken so I rang the hotel direct. OK, I hope this doesn't sound racist but I did have a job understanding the accent for a minute or two, but the mist cleared and I understood that he had no booking logged for me. Could he assist further? No, best try 'Customer Services.' an 03 number that costs you an arm and a leg.
Nevertheless I rang it. As usual with these numbers, it gives you a range of options, but none of them were 'If we have taken your money, and not given you a booking, press eleven', nor 'for all other enquiries, press twelve...'. I opted for the bookings number and sat back to listen to bursts of music interposed with Lenny Henry telling me how much easier it is to book on line, which is a little galling when I am trying to sort out why the on-line hasn't happened. In fact altogether not 'app't'. How long was I waiting? I remember glancing at my phone as it passed nine and a half minutes, how much longer after I don't recall but a nice friendly lady came on the line and confirmed that there was no booking for me at Tonbridge North. Could she assist further? No, but she would refer it to a supervisor with an 'urgent' tag and took my phone number and e-mail.
By now it was half-eleven, and I felt as though most of my limited free time had been spent on this one thing. By half one, I was getting frustrated, and although it was tempting to find any other hotel, anywhere rather than Premier Inn, I logged back on and booked for Tonbridge South (to avoid any confusion when the matter was finally investigated). At ten past two, I hit the road heading first across to Mansfield to pick up some 140 bore ducting for 1387s air intake. The van seems to like warmer weather as fuel consumption rapidly rose, though assisted by my deliberate attempt to keep speed down to around 55 to save fuel and tyre wear. By the time I was down around Heathrow it had achieved 57.6 mpg overall, but a succession of accidents and other incidents, with slow traffic and tail backs, dragged that down. By the time I came off at Reigate it was after seven pm and I sought out a house and delivered the lifting chains that Andrew had sold the gentleman through ebay. He was over the moon at the prompt delivery (he kept trying to push money into my hand, but he'd already paid Andrew the carriage so I declined) and explained he was part of a charity which restores military vehicles and they want to pull cars round with them.
Rather than return to the M25, I picked up the old A25 which I must have used a few times in my youth before the motorway was built. Eventually, about half eight, I arrived at Tonbridge South to find it was being refurbished but more importantly the conjoined pub had a technical issue and had no cooked meals nor English breakfasts available. So I was stuck with a continental for the morning and another refund due. Tonbridge seems to have little to commend itself to the railway historian save that it was the base for Holman F Stephens, but if there is a blue plaque I never found it in my quick tour sourcing an alternative repast. But I eschew junk foods and found little to tempt me, so ended up at the Sainsbury's where I could get a snack and some more bottled water.
Tuesday morning: I was due to meet Phil G at Spa Valley just after eight o'clock, he'd set off ahead of me the previous day and when I turned off for Reigate he had been a few miles ahead, stuck in the tail back from a lorry fire. But my usual sense of direction was dulled by the previous day, lack of evening meal and less-than-Premier breakfast and when I got to a junction and thought 'I should turn right here' I failed to act on it and drifted left. Given that this was in part what passes for the morning rush hour in uptown Royal Tunbridge Wells (notice that it is plain old Tonbridge but Royal Tunbridge) I couldn't turn round after realising my error. Suffice it to say it was 08.45 before I arrived at the Spa Valley Railway but it made no difference as the gates were locked. After half an hour I obtained the gate code and we admitted ourselves, but the sun was already up and my master plan to get as much as possible done before it got hot was thus thwarted.
Awaiting us was a ferry van - some way away in fact from where we were loading and we had to pay out the entire winch rope and add a chain or two in order to reach it. It was a tight fit and with having to re-secure the winch to different places on the 'van to stay within the winch radius, plus frequent breaks for drinks, it was about twelve fifteen by the time Phil was backing down, and with the adjacent bridge well below the height of the 'van Phil had to negotiate the surrounding residential streets, missing vans and VW Golfs. I steered him for the first quarter mile and here I took the only photograph I could, having been too hot/busy/hungry/tired to fish a camera out the van earlier.
He told me later that it took him an hour to get out of Royal Tunbridge Wells and I daresay parts of the Royal Borough were glad to see him go. As for me, I grabbed a cuppa with the one SVR member who had arrived and then pointed myself south, to collect a hydraulic oil tank that we'd won last night on ebay, before returning back north through Crawley and East Grinstead to the M25, noticing roadside fires on the M23 and near Cobham services and a far bigger pall of smoke from somewhere in the Uxbridge direction.
As I neared the M1 the warning signs were giving out 30 minute delays around Luton, which changed to 45 minutes as you got on the M1 itself, so at Junction 8 I followed the crowd into Hemel Hempstead, then the road to Leighton Buzzard, north east across to the A5 and then into Milton Keynes and thence back on to the M1 north of the problem. Needless to say Phil didn't have that option and was sat in the tailback from another lorry fire. Overall fuel consumption for the 2 days, 55.3.
Wednesday: You may notice that I have not mentioned the feedback from the supervisor from the urgent referral: that's because there wasn't any, and I spent time on Wednesday morning drafting a complaint and scouring the Premier Inn website for a real live contact e-mail address. Sure, they were anxious that I give them feedback on my stay but in a space that did not do justice to what I wanted to say. As for making a complaint, well one can only assume that they think themselves so good as to never generate any or, like certain Banks, they simply don't want to receive them. (A solicitor once told me: Barclays Bank won't tell you how to make a complaint until you managed to make one.) Eventually I found an 'ask a question' option and pinged them a question on how to complain, then disappeared out to the workshops as Tony S had taken a day out of his hols to come across and bring the goodies from a recent on-line bidding session that Andrew had partaken in. These included more lashing points for the trailers, two 110 Volt drills (one of which worked once I fitted a servicable plug) and a few other bits, all in all a good haul for the expenditure. Meanwhile I started to fit Monday's 140 bore trunking to 1387. I fought it hard but it resisted all my efforts. I put a tape measure across its bore. It was 125.
I was in and about, too and when I got home late in the afternoon it was to find that Premier Inn had generated a reply giving me a number of trite FAQs but included a 'case number' and a genuine e-mail address (i.e. not a '
Phil meanwhile, was having a comparatively easy day. After his late evening return to HFS' base on Tuesday, he had left my trailer and instead picked up an HFS extendable and headed back down south to the Isle of Wight ferry. Thus at 07.00 Thursday morning he was at Havenstreet, to pick up a carriage chassis (no bogies) from the IoWSR bound for Dr Ben at Rowsley. Once loaded he was straight back to the ferry over to the mainland while I ran an errand over towards Warrington (51.3 mpg).
Friday and the weather could not have been more different to Monday/Tuesday, well apart from maybe snowing, that is. I drifted down to Rowsley after a while to see how Phil was getting on: he was all set to leave as the underframe (which had been turned upsidedown for ease of loading) had been craned on top of the underframe we had brought in from Crewe a month or so ago.
To make best use of the crane, Ben had arranged to split his milk tanker, an LMS 6w'er but currently devoid of its middle axle. Apparently it is genuine to the locale, having worked to the dairies at Rowsley - a dairy whose opening in the 1930s spelt the end for the Leek & Manifold incidentally.
Anyway, I hung around getting wet while tank was transferred and the frame lifted onto stands, ready for restoration, recreation of its middle axleguards, etc. I commented to Ben how pleasant it was (aside from the weather) to be at Rowsley and not feel unwelcome or that a certain lady would be driving up from Matlock or passing messages to tell me that 'I'm not allowed to touch Peak Rail infrastructure' and he too was conscious of the more pleasant atmosphere pervading the railway as a whole.
There was an e-mail in from Andy M to the effect he would be around this weekend if we were? We welcomed him wholeheartedly and although I had written the program for a Zelio 'smart relay' to take over from the obsolete pcb Safe Load Indicator system, I thought it might be a good idea to get it loaded to the Zelio in readiness. And boy did that waste my time. It was so smart that it insisted I had to have a remote modem attached and demanded that I record phone numbers and such for it to ring people up. But I shouldn't have needed one and given that they were around another £180 each, wasn't about to get one just so a Smart Relay could ring up its friends and moan about how I was treating it. There was however another down at the workshops which I had programmed before and although it was technically part of another job, I could replace it if the need arose. Thus on Saturday we welcomed Andy and he set to removing the old pcb and replacing it with the Zelio and cabling it as per my diagram.
By mid afternoon he was ready and I set up my EEEP and downloaded a mere 23 lines of program. I would like to say that it worked, but I'd be wrong. I had tried to be too clever and getting my head around the Zelio version of Ladder language always takes me a while when I had been last working in another dialect. We did however prove that the transducer had no load at start up, but as soon as the boom started to unfold it gave an output of 0.6Volt, rising to 1.7 by the time the boom was anywhere near fully deployed.
My first threshold point, to prove the SLI was functioning, was to detect that initial stage but I had tried to link it to the boom-at-rest detector and that was too clever for my own good. Abashed, I went home Saturday night to re-write the program.
Sunday, and back I was with a mere 12 lines of program that, to be honest, didn't work either, although this was largely due to my not having entered the parameters for the analog input correctly. (Never done it before). It looked promising, the 'operating' light flashed at start up, but it was supposed to go continuous once the initial 0.5V programmed threshold had been detected and it didn't. All this wasn't helped by intermittent drizzle but eventually I realised that the override relay output that stops the job if you're overloaded needed to be inverted, so changed its output line into a program marker and added a 13th line that turned the original output on whenever the new marker was off.
My second realisation was how I should have set up the analog input settings, so reconfigured them and on start up my operating light flashed then went steady as the boom unfurled. Next thing was to find something with which to establish the transducer output at 100% load. Using our crane scale, we rigged up the Lister TS3 with its frame and tanks, yet with its battery it was too heavy, without it too light, but with Andy's tool bag instead it was bang on: if we were the three bears Goldilocks never showed. Andrew extend it out to its range at that weight and we took a reading on the transducer.
Put it back down, calculate the 90% voltage and reset the paramaters. There's a fourth paramater, again to verify that the transducer itself is working, so that if it fails by going to short circuit, the whole crane again shuts down. Should this ever happen, my program will have all 3 (operating,. 90 and 100% lights) flashing in unison. Time to verify that the first two stages work. Picking up a heavier lump, Andrew extended the crane out, while I stood behind him fretting in case the whole thing didn't do anything. As we approached where he guessed our range should stop, the yellow 90% light flickered then came on. A few seconds later, the red 100% light did the same and the crane refused to go further. To get out of this, an override button is pressed and this gives you a five second grace to get back else it stops again. I would like to fit an audible alarm and put provision into the Zelio for one but it will have to be loud to overcome the noise of the Deutz running at 1500rpm and will come later. Similarly I'd like to put a bit of software in that delays the 100% stop coming on until the indication is steady and not flickering (to prevent relay chatter in synch) but for the present we have a working SLI and that takes us on to getting it formally certified as fit for use. Pause for celebratory cup of tea and Andy's Hobnobs.
The rest of the afternoon was something of an anticlimax. Poor Andy was banished to the underside of the Hatramm to isolate the redundant alternator and move the wiring for the tacho from it to its colleague on the other side of the engine. Apparently it was very restricted in there. I have stripped out the surplus warning light in the panel, but at other times was doing miscellaneous jobs on 1387 to do with wiring and forthcoming bits to sort. Andrew was at work at the hacksaw and drill stand manufacturing parts for a winch installation.
And that's about it. Sorry if some of it got a bit technical, or distinctly non-railway, but that's the way it goes. Who knows what it will be next week. I don't, (other than there's a ferry van still sat on my trailer) but all being well there'll be something to say. See ya then.