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George Tomlinson finds former work colleague - Don Stott |
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(Left: George and his wife, Stella - 2006) The name rang a bell, but could not think of when or where. I read through Don’s short resume of his working life and my memory came flooding back. It was around the year 1979 that British Railways Board asked me to devise a hierarchical system to provide a cost effective system for the diagnostics and maintenance of the increasing amount of electronic equipment being used on railway traction control systems. Due to requirement for competitive tendering for the supply of locomotives, then every electronic control system was different, and required specialist maintenance and repair at the original manufacturers, and that is where the high cost element occurred. I devised such a system, to allow specially trained railway engineers provide their own maintenance in clean room repair facilities. The Board accepted my proposals and gave me the executive role of establishing 7 new repair centres, recruitment and training the appropriate staff.
The concept was to provide something which would be easily read, and at the same time, capture the imagination of all grades of the workforce. The railways had no facilities for professional publication of booklets, so I took my sketches and text to the remains of the Rolls Royce Technical Publications Department located in Slack Lane, Derby. The task was to convert the somewhat "bland procedures" into simple line drawings; my originals were a bit "draughtsman style", but with the help of a young "slim and leggy blonde" and Don Stott, the work began. Don was in charge of a team of technical authors with great drawing skills. They were to make 1,000 copies. Don's technical illustrators even tried to make the drawing on the last page look like me in order to add some impact to the booklet! The booklet became so popular that I even had engineers bringing in hand coloured versions by their children. Those booklets have been used as the basis for electronic equipment repair in Railways around the World, in Egypt 1982, China 1983, and France in 1994 for Eurostar trainsets to name but a few. I still have a copy of this small booklet to hand – it took me less than 3 minutes to find it after all those years. Clearly the drawings look a bit dated nowadays but the underlying system is still in operation. I know that today it looks boring, but at that time it was a quite revolutionary technique for getting a whole workforce on your side. The World is certainly small, and when I engaged Don and his team to carry out this work, I had no idea that he was an Old Centaur.
See the Booklet on which George and Don worked here. |
READING
through recent additions to the Old Centaurs site, I noticed a
He should
have a great deal of satisfaction from seeing the result of his team
effort in producing this little booklet that in spirit created the basis
of many railway organisation electronic maintenance regimes.