Keith finds a movie-prop caboose-- Jim Wiggin and a new switching tower-- Jon Grant with some woodpiles at Abanda-- Kenneth L. Anthony with an ATSF switchstand-- Up next.....Leasors
I had some troubles with mine, the end of last week. Must be going around, just like a nasty cold bug.
A pulp yard is such an easy lineside industry to model. Sometimes I am surprised by we don''t see more of them on model railroads.
In my former life when we had equipment in a critical command, control, or communication path, we installed a parallel system. The parallel system would "ghost" the active system, executing every command, interrupt, and response that the active system was executing at the exact same time. The only difference being that ghost's input and output interfaces were disabled and blocked. The active and ghost systems constantly communicated with each other. The instant the active system failed to respond to the ghost system, the ghost system took control of everything, transferred all interfaces, and sounded alarms to wake up the techies. In the meantime, the users, controllers, or processes never knew that the active system had failed, that a transfer had been made, and that the ghost was now controlling the path. The relatively small additional equipment and installation cost up front was far outweighed by long-term customer satisfaction and confidence over years, even decades of service. BTW, our customers were not just the US military, but also manufacturing plants such as glass, paper, cement, steel, power where an unscheduled interruption of the process would be catastrophic. Manufacturing plants that had to run continuously, it took days, even weeks to start up and shut down processes properly.
Regardless of the ISP problems, our photographers and Buddy just keep doing a great job. I can't wait to get out again so I can enter!
I guess I shouldn't have vented as much, but Cableone, my ISP, also was down most of this morning and yesterday. So I was as frustrated as the rest of you. My problem is that I know what causes it and how to fix it. First, you lock the Bean Counters and MBAs in their offices. Then you let the engineers do their job and give the customer what the marketeer sold him. Engineers know that years of customer satisfaction and goodwill creates much higher profits in the future than trying to save a few bucks by installing an unreliable bare-bones system today.