Earlier quoted context omitted.
'Those who can, do; those who can't, teach' -George Bernard Shaw
TIL that quote is _actually_ from George Bernard Shaw. https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/176500.html
and I thought it was Jack Black
Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
141–150 of 365 posts
Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like it was a crew scheduling issue. So if you implement some manual replacement for the automated system, it's possible that train crews will "time out" before they reach the destination, stranding passengers in the middle of nowhere. Or, will make a tired crew operate the trains, and tired people aren't very good at safety sensitive tasks. There was an incident a few years ago where a LIRR track crew memb…
> It sounds like it was a crew scheduling issue. I'm not from the NL, but I have travelled there by train. My feeling is that they have very dense traffic, but in a relatively small country most trains don't travel more than 2 hours. That means each driver and each conductor needs to make 4 different trips a day. And because they need breaks they proably switch trains during a working day. If all this planning has be…
20 years ago, the NS - the Dutch National Railroad company - tried to remove complication from the railroad schedule and got a lot of criticism from their employees because it would mean they would travel less far from their home stations. Train drivers said “so we will only be driving around our church”. It led to a lot of protests and eventually a lot of the plans were revoked.
See https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondje_om_de_kerk (in Dutch, use Google Translate to translate to a language of your choice).
Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try to run the pricing system in Denmark if it hasn't been changed over the years.... It was "deem" "impossible" for a human to calculate the pricing within a reasonable amount of time (with all the associated bonus). Do not forget that there might several companies running on the same track, cargoa and passenger trains etc. Managing a busy track is hell.
> It was "deem" "impossible" for a human to calculate I live in Malmö so you have to understand I'm obliged to make a "well no wonder given the Danish counting system" joke here > Fifty is halvtreds, which stands for halvtredje-sinds-tyve, meaning “third half times twenty”, or “two scores plus half of the third score” [2½ 20]* https://www.languagesandnumbers.com/how-to-count-in-danish/e...
Indeed it is a very weird way of counting. It was a question on Code Golf a few years ago:
https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/92657/count-to-...
What is remarkable here is that usually there are a lot of answers in dedicated golfing languages that can solve seemingly very complex tasks in just a few tens of bytes, here there is only one such answer, and it takes 115 bytes. So perhaps one could say it's even hard for computers?
Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
#144It wasn't the IT failure that kept the trains from running. It was management failure, not ensuring they could run without the IT system.
They do have some kind of crisis mode where trains run back and forth between three stations, but maybe they had no way to trigger even that.
Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
#145Failed OTA update?
Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the notice: > It affected the system that generates up-to-date schedules for trains and staff. ...boy oh boy did trying to look into what NS uses for crew scheduling ever send me down a rabbit hole. I don't know if the systems have changed but while poking around online I found this[1] doc about the Netherlands' timetable revamp around 2006 and it talks about the complexity of TURNI-- their on-the-fly crew sched…
> everything else in their IT land outside this system runs off SAP (likely including the actual distribution of the output of crew scheduling) so if I had to gamble I'd say the failure happened somewhere in the integration between them. I have a reflex repulsion for off-the-shelf "enterprise" software. You pay millions of dollars to subscribe to a suite of (seemingly) bad, bloated software that takes more work to cu…
My previous boss recently tried to pick up an enterprise solution. He runs a non-software company that has a lot of custom internal apps - 90% built/maintained by interns. Of course the intern-built custom apps are super buggy but the bugs get fixed immediately, and the system is tailored to the company's way of doing things. The company spent an obscene amount of money just demoing a full-fledged SAP-type thing to potentially replace the custom stuff, but they ultimately found the rag-tag web apps better and cancelled the SAP contract.
That whole situation convinced me pretty thoroughly that "enterprise" software is indeed a form of large-scale snake oil. I think most businesses can go a long way with just spreadsheets and email.
Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
#147While having algorithms and computers dictating every aspect of train movements, crew scheduling, resource allocation is efficient and in a sense optimal, I think there's something compelling to be said about having a system that can survive with human-rememberable patterns when such an optimizer fails. That it can fall back on (or have at the core) simple patterns that people can still operate without algorithmic in…
I work within the train system of a European country (with ticketing, so I’m on the top and not the bottom of things). From my experience with station and onboard crew, I am very certain that the schedules and patterns are still very much human rememberable, at least collectively: People have to show up for work, drive the train and many other things. My guess is that the failure is related to signalling or some othe…
The Dutch railways said (in Dutch) themselves that it was a problem with the scheduling software which also has a role in safety. Apparently this is also used to route around for example a stopped train, so when it's not working it's not safe to operate anything but a handful of trains.
There was a lot of extra impact because this system also feeds the passenger information so their app, website and information screens at the stations were not working either leaving passengers in the dark.
Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
#148What jumps out at me after reading this notice is how it completely lacks any apology. I am not prescribing what it should say but merely observing that having lived in North America for sometime now, it seems hard for me to imagine for such a notice to not sound profusely apologetic here.
Note: I do not consider words like 'unfortunately' and 'extremely unpleasant' apologetic. Also, I understand there are cultural differences between the Netherlands and the USA- no joke.
Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the notice: > It affected the system that generates up-to-date schedules for trains and staff. ...boy oh boy did trying to look into what NS uses for crew scheduling ever send me down a rabbit hole. I don't know if the systems have changed but while poking around online I found this[1] doc about the Netherlands' timetable revamp around 2006 and it talks about the complexity of TURNI-- their on-the-fly crew sched…
> sidenote: If anyone out there is an SAP specialist ns.nl looks like a pretty great place to work: 36hr week, 5 weeks vacation, pension, and free unlimited 2nd class + low cost 1st class train travel. Those are pretty standard terms here in .NL. 36 hours is considered fulltime by most employers, including government and semi-government. Pension is offered almost everywhere and at least 4 weeks vacation is the legal…
Indeed pretty standard, even in non-government it would be 40 hours but all other terms the same and most likely a company car + private use of it instead of the train.
And I'm also sure they have a significant on-call setup of the IT teams for any out of office hours issues, just like every other large 24x7 kind of organization.
Re: Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
#150I wonder if this is connected to a similar incident in Italy. https://news.yahoo.com/italys-state-railway-may-target-16341...
Considering the state of Italian railways IT, I wonder if the attack was accomplished by entering admin/admin in some login box.
I think it's more likely that they didn't have any password at all :)