Excerpt from Railway-Signalling Automatic; An Introductory Treatment of the Purposes, Equipment, and Methods of Automatic Signalling and Track-Circuits for Steam and Electric Railways, for Railwaymen, Students, and Others
I could not, as I looked through the accompanying pages of my son's book, help allowing my thoughts to wander over the changes that have been made, in my day, in railway-signalling. When I entered the railway service five-and-forty years ago, signalling, generally, was very primitive. Now it is almost perfect; the machine itself has reached perfection, but the man behind the machine is human and, therefore, frail. It is in this latter respect that there is any weakness, and therein lies the main cause for the demand for automatic signalling and track-circuit - the subject of the present work.
I remembered, too, that, although this perfection has now been reached, its development has been slow. It might have been reached much earlier, because, in 1872 - four years before I joined the railway - Sykes put down his first automatic signalling at the Victoria Station of the Metropolitan District Railway and Dr. Robinson patented his method of track-circuit on which all the automatic signalling of to-day is based.
It is within the last twenty years that there has been this great development. At the time my first book was published, in May, 1900, there was no automatic signalling in this country, except that, since removed, on the Liverpool Overhead; there were not half-a-dozen installations of track-circuit, and only one power signalling plant, and that in a goods yard.
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