Welcome to my blog. Thank you so much for your interest in reading this, it means a lot to me.
First things first. Why this blog is called ‘Signalling Simplicity’? Let me explain.
Signalling reputation as ‘dark art’
I have spent my entire professional career in railway signalling. Since I started in 1991, I noted a distinct prejudice against the signalling profession as being a “dark art” for geeks who speak their own language that normal railway professionals would never understand. I soon learned from alleged ‘experts’ in my field that signalling is highly complicated and it takes forever to learn and understand it. A typical comment I heard during that time was: “One takes at least two years to be able to work our interlocking design tools by themselves.”
Back then I was intimidated and in awe how incredibly complicated interlocking must be. Today, I would probably comment that this guy’s interlocking design tools are shit.
Adverse effects of buying the prejudice
My early career was sadly impacted by this initial intimidation. I shied away from interlocking as being too complicated for me which precluded me from a core part of the business of my employer at the time. The other thing that kept bothering me was to be seen as the ‘odd one out’ by railway colleagues from other disciplines who were able to explain and communicate their stuff in much more understandable terms.
Enough is enough
At some stage I decided that I do no longer want to be bothered by this. Mainly because in modern ‘high performance signalling’ (if you want to know more about that, I suggest you subscribe to my newsletter on this website) this isolation of signalling begins to affect wider parts of railway organisations. See, modern signalling technologies such as CBTC or ETCS are meant to improve the operation of a railway, not just preventing trains from running into each other. But if any non-signalling railway person thinks that signalling is something they will never understand, the industry at large is in for big problems.
Finding Simplicity
More and more I found out that most aspects of railway signalling can be explained to ‘normal’ non-signalling professionals in quite simple ways, and they actually do understand it. Often they are surprised as they were brainwashed they would “never understand anything to do with signalling”. Surprisingly, I found that particularly the new technologies such as CBTC lend themselves to being explained simply, because they are so common-sensical.
‘Signalling for everyone’ as mission
It has become my mission over the last few years to explain signalling to non-signalling people in ways that they can understand and appreciate. I have done this through my consulting practice (for more information and enquiries, go to the Services page on this website) and through my very successful training courses (more information on the Courses page on this website). If I want to be known for anything at the end of my career, it should be for bringing signalling knowledge to non-signalling people. So I thought that ‘Signalling Simplicity’ would be a worthwhile theme for this blog.
How this blog will work for you
As I develop this blog by adding more posts, I will pick topics from the field of railway signalling, particularly from what I call High Performance Signalling, and explain it in a way that hopefully everybody can understand. You as my valued reader of this blog have an opportunity to interact for making it better. You can do that by suggesting topics or asking questions that you want me to explain in this blog. And you can let me know if you have not understood anything that I wrote about in my blog posts. You can just use the Contact page below to get in touch.
So let’s do this. I hope it serves you, so please enjoy reading and if you think it is worthwhile tell your colleagues about it.
To Signalling Simplicity,
your Doc Frank
