Tech
Vintage rail freight system showcases 50-year-old innovation | Computer Weekly
Fifty years ago, three IBM System 370 mainframes powered a pioneering scheduling system run by the UK’s national rail operator, British Rail. Called Total Operations Processing System (Tops), when it went live on 27 October 1975, the system revolutionised the control of all rail freight operations across Britain online and in real time.
It used British Rail’s own telephone network and, along with a pair of IBM System 370/168 and a System 370/158 mainframe, Ventek minicomputers with built-in punchcard machines were installed at every area freight terminal.
In an article published in its 30 October 1973 magazine issue, Computer Weekly described the system as: “One of the most extensive and comprehensive freight management systems in the world.”
Commenting on the 50th anniversary, Jonathan Aylen, a Tops specialist at the University of Manchester, said: “Tops covered the whole of the UK, every freight wagon and loco, every train movement and every cargo all monitored by a central computer system at Marylebone in London. The control headquarters was described as ‘space age’ for its day.”
Marylebone housed 32 IBM 3330/33301 Control Data Drives, providing a whooping 3.2Mbytes of storage.
The Computer Weekly article reported that Tops divided the country into 152 Tops Responsibility Areas (TRAs), each with a Ventek 9200 minicomputer system. Describing how the system operated, the Computer Weekly article noted: “The basis for Tops in the field is the punch card, one card for one wagon. As traffic is moved from one TRA to another, new cards showing the changed status are produced. The receiving officer at an Area Freight Centre (AFC) checks the cards against wagons and feeds this information into the system to update the database.”
As Aylen noted in The convergence of computing and telecommunications: Cold War to coal trains paper he co-authored in 2024, the network British Rail used was state of the art for the time, using co-axial cables for the main trunk line links, with 4Mhz analogue transmission (equivalent to 960 telephone channels). Local links were carried on 12 channel frequency division multiplex systems on balanced copper cable pairs. These gave a high-quality speech path of 4Khz channels to every major station, office complex and freight yard in the country.
But it also stretched overseas. Computer Weekly reported that Ventek minicomputers were also deployed in France at Dunkirk, and there was a Telex link in Zeebruggee, Belgium. Data from the freight centres was fed into the Marylebone computer room via a data network which spanned 400km.

“Today we take computer control of business operations for granted. But fifty years ago, it was a revolution to know what was happening right across the business in real time, especially a system which saw up to 3,000 freight train movements daily,” Aylen said.
Tops highlighted the actual demand for wagons, which meant that many were surplus and sold for scrap, therefore reducing maintenance costs and helping to pay for the overall system.
Bob Gwynne, rail expert, said: “This had one major unforeseen consequence: one scrapyard in South Wales concentrated on quick and easy wagon disposal. Difficult steam locos were set aside for later. This breathing space led to 213 steam locomotives being acquired for preservation, approximately two-thirds of the total steam locomotives preserved today.
“So, an unintended effect of Tops was the birth of the heritage railways as a nationwide tourism product, rather than the handful of locations that pre-date 1975.”

Many thanks to The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) for providing scans of the original Computer Weekly article. The full Computer Weekly archive dating back to September 1966 is held at TNMOC.
Tech
The Best Babbel Promo Codes and Deals for April 2026
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Tech
Robotaxi Outage in China Leaves Passengers Stranded on Highways
An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour.
In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-driving taxis, people on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly malfunction and stop operating. Photos and videos shared online show the Baidu cars halted on busy highways, often in the fast lane.
A college student in Wuhan tells WIRED that she was stuck in a Baidu robotaxi with two friends for about 90 minutes on Tuesday. (She asked to be only identified with her last name, He, to protect her privacy.) The student says the car malfunctioned and stopped four or five times during the trip before it eventually parked in front of an intersection in eastern Wuhan. Luckily, it was not a busy road, and the group was not in immediate danger. The screen display in the car asked the passengers to remain in the car with seatbelt on and wait for a company representative to come “in five minutes,” according to a photo He shared with WIRED.
He says it took about 30 minutes to reach a Baidu customer representative on the phone. “They kept saying it would be reported to their superior. But they didn’t explain what caused [the outage] or let us know how long we needed to wait for the staff to come,” He says. But no one ever came, and after another hour of waiting, the three passengers decided to just get out and go home by themselves (the doors weren’t locked).
On Chinese social media, other passengers also complained about being unable to reach Baidu’s customer support. “I tried every way I could think of to call for help using the options the app showed, but the phone line wouldn’t go through, and when I pressed the SOS button it told me it was unavailable. So then what exactly is the SOS for?” wrote one person in a post on RedNote alongside a video showing the button not working. She said she had to force the door to open and get out of the car as traffic halted to a complete stop behind her robotaxi. “Apollo Go, you really owe me an apology,” she wrote.
Baidu didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Local police in Wuhan issued a statement around midnight in China that said the situation was “likely caused by a system malfunction,” but the incident is still under investigation. No one was injured and all passengers have exited the vehicles, the police added. It’s unclear how many of Baidu’s robotaxis may have been impacted.
One dash cam recording posted to RedNote shows a car passing 16 Apollo Go vehicles parked on the road in the span of 90 minutes. On several occasions, the video shows the driver narrowly avoiding hitting the robotaxis by braking or changing lanes at the last minute.
Others were apparently not as fortunate. In another RedNote post, a man claimed he crashed into one of the malfunctioning Baidu vehicles. The man wrote in the caption that he was driving over 40 mph on a highway when the car in front of him suddenly changed lanes to avoid the stopped robotaxi. He couldn’t react fast enough and ended up running into the self-driving car. Photos of the man’s orange SUV being towed away show that the car’s front-right fender was completely torn off, and other parts appeared to have sustained major damage.
Tech
Our Favorite Affordable Air Purifier Is Temporarily Even Cheaper
Tired of the stale, fetid air looming over your apartment like a cloud? Check out the Coway Airmega Mighty, an already wallet-friendly home air purifier that’s even cheaper right now as part of the Amazon Big Spring Sale. It’s currently marked down to just $154, a $76 discount from its typical price, but you’ll want to move quickly if you’re interested, as the deal is only available for a limited time.
Despite its low price tag and squat stature, the Airmega Mighty is capable of cleaning a substantial amount of space. At full bore, it can handle a 361-square-foot space, although you’ll get the best performance, and save your ears, if you’re closer to a 200-square-foot room. If you don’t want it running constantly, there are built-in timers to automatically shut off after 1, 4, or 8 hours, or you can use Eco Mode, which will run until the Might doesn’t sense any dirty air for half an hour.
That’s right, the Airmega Mighty has a built-in air quality sensor, and it reflects the current state of the air quality using a colored light with three levels. It uses those readings to automatically adjust the fan speed and timing settings on the fly, as well as giving you a peak into how bad the air you’re breathing right now is for you. While it lacks integration with smart home setups like Google Home, it makes up for it by handling all of its own business without Wi-Fi or extra apps on your phone.
While the Coway Airmega Mighty is available in three colors, only the black and silver model is currently discounted, so you’ll have to pay full price if it doesn’t match your living room’s color scheme. We’ve put in the work testing every air purifier we could get our hands on, so make sure to check out the full guide if you’re trying to clean up your space. The Coway is discounted as part of Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, and we’ve got the best deals from products we’ve tested gathered in one place if you want to save some bucks.
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