199307 – Rasborsek, Fuller, McGregor, Hockings & Szacsvay – Inventing Big Brother: Monitoring the Railway Environment

For the first century and a half of its history, the railway was a labour-intensive environment. It was operated and maintained by large numbers of workers, spread throughout the network. This workforce also carried out the continuous surveillance of the line, safeworking equipment, and the railways environment There were staff in place to give timely notice of equipment failure, or excessive natural phenomena like temperature or rainfall. If a unit failed, there were staff in place to institute emergency working, and the fault itself was both simple enough and remained in place long enough for a maintainer to identify and repair it.

The past two decades have seen a threefold change. Firstly, there are fewer people about. Mechanised maintenance methods allow fewer people to maintain longer lengths of railway, and technologically advanced signalling and communications enable fewer and fewer to operate the railway (especially in expansive countries like Australia where long stretches of track now function with no operations staff manning them.) The equipment that provides this improved productivity does not come without its own problems; the increased complexity of the equipment means that transient failures may occur, leaving no sign afterwards. Thirdly, we live in the Information Age, and the demand for more information, available sooner, extends to the status of the railway. All of these factors have led to the growing interest in the development of remote sensing, monitoring and warning systems.