More B****y Paperwork
Over the years I have collected all sorts of stray railway documents (mostly of the diesel locomotive engineering kind). They have come to be from friends, ex-railwaymen, and bought off the internet (Ebay etc) or at railway marts or car boot sales.
So I have a collection of Workshop Overhaul Standard Specifications (WOSS), TSUs (training books), and a fine array of engineering notices (LDs and MPs etc). All very well and good.
Last week I turned up at a railway mart, to be greeted by a stallholder who knows my particular fetish. With a huge grin he presented me with a few sheets of roughly photocopied paper, covered in oily fingerprints and looking more than a little worse for wear.
“Would sir be interested in these?”
Fortunately Network Rail group standards are not my thing as I can get them for free by other methods, and as I pointed out to him, the set he was offering were not even up to date, as they had been superseded by more recent issues.
However this encounter got me thinking. How do I know that my other documents are the most up to date available……
By the 1980s some rudimentary version control was in place and this practice is now second nature to almost everyone involved in document handling and reproduction.
But back in the 1970s document version control on the railway was not widely practiced outside the cloistered atmosphere of the drawing offices. But then giving a document a reference code as well as a title appears to have been fairly alien to them too. In fact I have two documents both produced by different departments inside BR, published within two weeks of each other, and both have the same title but cover fairly different subject matter.
So taking a real example. I have two copies of a document called “Diesel Locomotive Disposal”. One in a blue cover the other in green. They are not identical, but very similar. So how can I tell which is the later version? Indeed is there anyway of knowing? Or do I just guess that the copy with the corrected typos and extra few paragraphs is more up to date than the other one? Hardly satisfactory but unless anyone out there knows differently its my starter for 10.
So I have a collection of Workshop Overhaul Standard Specifications (WOSS), TSUs (training books), and a fine array of engineering notices (LDs and MPs etc). All very well and good.
Last week I turned up at a railway mart, to be greeted by a stallholder who knows my particular fetish. With a huge grin he presented me with a few sheets of roughly photocopied paper, covered in oily fingerprints and looking more than a little worse for wear.
“Would sir be interested in these?”
Fortunately Network Rail group standards are not my thing as I can get them for free by other methods, and as I pointed out to him, the set he was offering were not even up to date, as they had been superseded by more recent issues.
However this encounter got me thinking. How do I know that my other documents are the most up to date available……
By the 1980s some rudimentary version control was in place and this practice is now second nature to almost everyone involved in document handling and reproduction.
But back in the 1970s document version control on the railway was not widely practiced outside the cloistered atmosphere of the drawing offices. But then giving a document a reference code as well as a title appears to have been fairly alien to them too. In fact I have two documents both produced by different departments inside BR, published within two weeks of each other, and both have the same title but cover fairly different subject matter.
So taking a real example. I have two copies of a document called “Diesel Locomotive Disposal”. One in a blue cover the other in green. They are not identical, but very similar. So how can I tell which is the later version? Indeed is there anyway of knowing? Or do I just guess that the copy with the corrected typos and extra few paragraphs is more up to date than the other one? Hardly satisfactory but unless anyone out there knows differently its my starter for 10.
posted by TonyB at 8:23 pm
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