As info…those members of the CSX technology arm that were held responsible for the computer virus attack of 2004 are no longer with the company and not of their choice.
That virus attack acted upon the communications links of the various mainframe and outlying computer systems that must pass data between the systems to make everything operate. The virus busied up the traffic on those com links to the point of failure and upon restarting of an element of the system would again busy the com links up to the point of failure.
Once the problem was diagnosed and it was know that a fix was not immenant, alternative procedures were implemented to operate trains. One of those procedures was to isloate the Dispatching System from the Mainfraime until the Mainframe problems could be solved.
A reality of any business enterprise of today is that it is built around it’s computer systems. If the computers fail there is not sufficient manpower employed to be able to sustain the enterprise without the computers. That is a fact of life in any enterprise of any size.
Looks like another sun kink on the ol’ information super railroad to me. I’m reassured to see that occasionally the IT folks get held responsible for when their systems go down. Too often people get overwhelmed by an IT tech whose first question always seems to be “What did you do to it?” This is almost always followed by a string of garbled vocabulary only a Microsoft engineer could understand.
It’s also reassuring that there are manual backups to this kind of nonsense, and that there are enough old heads around who can implement them. Thank God no one got killed.
You think thats somthing…just wait until they start Installing the Next Generation Dispatching System In Indianpolis and Albany Next Month. (Its gona take alot of work)
How would the railroads have handled the extra traffic during WW2 if they had been computerized at the time? Any tiny glitch would have been a disaster[B)][8][:0]!
You can’t always blame the IT people. Often happens that spending on standby equipment is vetoed by some manager high up in the hierarchy, who knows nothing about IT, and forgets the fundamental law - No trains = no revenue.
