Quote:
Originally Posted by Aub
When I first joined the Switched Network Management Centre, in 1991, there were incidents of rogues pulling fibre optic cable out of ducting at the side of the main London North East railway line. The would pull the cables across the track, thinking it was copper and wait for the train to sever them. This caused problems for Mercury as, back then, they had no diversity to Scotland. This meant they had to, embarrassingly , ask BT to route traffic for them while repair were done.
Cheers
Aub
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Yes in the early 90’s this was a regular event, the cables were inside unsealed trackside ducting along with copper signalling cable. As an on call engineer I’d have to go and turn our lasers off so the BR S&T could find the break and repair it, it used to take hours usually over night. I’d sleep in the van until they’d finished. It got to the stage where there was so much loss it was difficult to get them working again.
Eventually Mercury laid their own fibre up the A697 with diversity up the west coast via the IoM and across the A69. By this time technology had improved and the distance between repeaters was much greater. This network is still used today.
John