Promoted!

Well, I didn’t really get promoted. I’m just doing a different job now, but one that actually requires thinking! There was only one supervisor this week. The other one who was scheduled to be here is busy fixing the other boxcar that we were supposed to get next week. So I was running the data station while Anthony ran the joint bars, and the supervisor did all the organizing and stuff.

This is the main screen I was looking at:

The graphs are real-time data of different properties of the rail, gauge, alignment, superelevation, etc. For a bit more of an explanation, see the ‘hurry up and wait’ blog. If the properties exceed certain values, then they will be flagged as either a priority or urgent defect. And that is where I came in – sometimes there would be spikes in the data, pieces of grass, reflection from the sun, road crossings, that would make the data do weird things. So I would look at each defect and see if it actually was there or not. Sometimes we don’t count certain defects in some areas – like alignment defects aren’t valid going over switches, as the lasers sometimes follow the wrong rail and give wrong answers. At the beginning I was calling Pat (the supervisor) over for each defect, but by the end of the week I was able to tell the difference between a spike and actual defects and taking things out by myself. Most of the time the tracks were pretty good, and there would only be valid urgents every 20 miles. But there was one track that had 15 come up in one mile, and I was frantically trying to see if they were valid or not and fell pretty far behind. But it requires thinking, which is kindof a nice change. It also requires knowledge of what we were doing that day. Before I would just start collecting images when they told me to, and I would have no idea where we were. But now I’m looking at the rail maps and figuring out exactly where we are going and the direction and subdivision names and start/end mileposts. I feel like I’m actually contributing/helping instead of doing a menial task.

The only downside is that I have less time to look out the window. And this week has been some pretty spectacular scenery. We started in Hamilton, went to Toronto, out to Orangeville and back, and then up north to Sudbury and am currently in North Bay for the weekend. Northern Ontario is already one of my favorite areas of Canada, and add into that the peak of the fall season with brilliant reds and yellows and oranges, and it gets pretty hard to concentrate on work. I’ll sort through all the pictures I did manage to take and post some good ones later.

For now though, I finally managed to get a copy of the Hobbit, after trying in vain at other used bookstores in London and Hamilton. The guy who ran the bookstore said that he was completely sold out, and had gone to order more only to find that everywhere else was sold out as well. The publisher had to reprint a whole bunch more to keep up with the demand. I can’t wait for the movie to come out!