tube drivers view
anonymously - obviously.....
well if you speak to any member of OPERATIONAL staff (not the muppetts who design and DONT work with the system) they will tell you the truth, in the case of Connect Project (previously Connect 2000 - only 8years late) its a case of 1 step forward and 20 steps back, the system is plain terrible to work with.
being digital i was suprised that it was that bad, our previous radio on our line worked in full duplex mode, this new one is only half duplex (only one person can can talk, where previously it worked more like a telephone line) and its sounds most of the time like a old 50s radio set. Communication has now become slow an awkward.
the whole system is split up into talk groups, so if your say at victoria station you would be on that talkgroup, if your driving the jubilee line you would be on thier control centre and so on and so forth. this is all well and good in theroy, but its too easy for station staff to broadcast on the wrong talkgroup and vice versa, thus this can be a serious problem for saftey and needs to be addressed, mis communication during a major incident because someone is on the wrong group could esculate and we could have serious problems.
the setup of the units are also too complicated to be effective in a major incident, our old system was a couple of buttons, radio and mayday - now there is still a mayday button but there is an assortment of other buttons that dont draw your attention as easily if your in a state of shock. But it makes our cabs look pretty with the pretty blue led desplay ugghh.
we have all been issued handset (train drivers), which are old fashioned and clunky to say the least, one good thing about them is we can make calls to any internal number - a clear telephone line (wish they done the same with the radio).
The system is poorly excuited, there is no information on who is calling you other than the pre programed numbers, basically if someone calls me telling me to do something it could be anyone if the number is not pre programed, unsafe, unhappy, total waste of taxpayers money. they didnt need to rip out our old reliable radios they could have issued the handsets for emergancy purposes and left the old systems in place then at least we would have had a back up system when radios go down which connect has done a number of times losing whole lines service for days at a time.
funny thing is it will probo be perfectly good enough for the police to use, but not the system it was supposed to be designed for
well i suppose thats progress, i wonder who got the big payout this time........
Biting the hand that feeds IT
