Dorothy,
Sorry took longer than I expected to find time for looking at your work.
Generally it was very good; clearly you know what you are doing and it was legible with good use made of the columns and kept to the essential information. Also you stated practices, defined $ notes and therefore (baring admin like candidate number and sheet number) it gives a good first impression. I'd actually recommend putting the more genral notes on a separate piece of lined A4 paper, so that you only have to do so once, just adding to it the first time you require when attempting a new route. Notes specific to a route are definitrely best kept on its own sheet.
You did however get tripped up on a few things which I think are really pressure of time and perhaps not being alert to exam pitfalls rather than any lack of understanding. Vey little that I noticed though.
615AM.
In the opposing route locking, you fell for the classic Charles Weightman “upside down routebox” as you listed 682A rather than 682F; a one-off error as you seemed to tumble to it from then.
Another trap was that you didn’t read the route box for 688E and therefore took the more obvious route via 147N rather than as stated 147R.
You presumably did see the note re the fact that no overlaps were to be provided at signals on non-passenger lines (which obviously is not to current NR practice); I think that I would have missed that as I saw the SOL and full O/L and it was only when I thought you had surprisingly missed it entirely that I re-checked and found it myself. I’d definitely be tempted to call 131N, releasing that lock if an appropriate forward route set from 645 or alternatively make 131 auto-normalise; obviously other routes would be calling 131N to give themselves trapping and flank, but I would certainly “soft call” and I think set & lock but not detect.
I don’t see why the route box specifies that 615 is only to display Y rather than G up to 645 at Y, but you certainly followed this ok. However I don’t feel that this is good practice and hidden prescriptive notes like this which are really quite anachronistic are one of the things that annoys me about this paper. In SSI it basically costs nothing to give a full sequence whereas historically with RRI then there would be a cost so giving an incentive for not providing. I agree that in reality it would not change the speed profile (unusually no signal dimensions are given on the 2012 plan) but since there is a route directly to a platform then in real life then I’d have provided the better aspect. This is an example where I have a difficulty with the IRSE’s statement of “follow your practices” yet giving a layout and prescriptive details that basically mean that you can’t! The layout is a peculiar mixture with quite a few old practices but then shunt overlaps.
It’s picky (and you may be best dealing with via a general note) but you haven’t specified all the separate ends to be included when detecting points. I guess you should also have listed some brief assumptions on a general notes sheet renot including TPWS, the spacing of signals etc.
Similarly I think that you should have referred to 615’s aspect proving 619 is off before itself clearing.
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686C
Another route that you did well. The only real quibbles are
a) in the list of tracks in the overlap over 127 reverse you seem to have written CK rather than DK,
b) for a terminal platform I think the A/L could have been 60seconds
c) it seems odd to me (but rather out of date on this nowadays) for shunt routes to main aspects have longer overlaps beyond them than the ROL when one is provided for the Warner- I guess that this is to standards but seems nonsense. Ditto when a route presets the exit signal, doesn’t seem valuable to worry about overlap route locking, but nothing wrong with what you have shown.
Well done for noting the potential for non-preferred routes and covering by a note; also for getting the swinging overlap correct- but perhaps a general note re “or swinging” would have been sensible.
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I seem to have printed out two copies of the same route and omitted one; its getting late so I'll catch up with the outstanding when I can in the next couple of days. I had a few unanticipated distractions this weekend to deal with- sorry.
Overall you did well; it will just be a matter of making sure you can do it in the time. Its quite a time since I have dealt with Control Tables and coming back to them and thinking about them now only being one question in the module 3, frankly I'd opt for the written questions, but if you can be quick and reasonably thorough then at least you know in outline what you are going to have to do for that bit of the paper. Searching the plan for all those hidden notes though has become all the more of an overhead, given that it is now only 1/3rd of the paper so still need a fair bit of the 10 minutes reading tme to select your other questions.
PJW
Sorry took longer than I expected to find time for looking at your work.
Generally it was very good; clearly you know what you are doing and it was legible with good use made of the columns and kept to the essential information. Also you stated practices, defined $ notes and therefore (baring admin like candidate number and sheet number) it gives a good first impression. I'd actually recommend putting the more genral notes on a separate piece of lined A4 paper, so that you only have to do so once, just adding to it the first time you require when attempting a new route. Notes specific to a route are definitrely best kept on its own sheet.
You did however get tripped up on a few things which I think are really pressure of time and perhaps not being alert to exam pitfalls rather than any lack of understanding. Vey little that I noticed though.
615AM.
In the opposing route locking, you fell for the classic Charles Weightman “upside down routebox” as you listed 682A rather than 682F; a one-off error as you seemed to tumble to it from then.
Another trap was that you didn’t read the route box for 688E and therefore took the more obvious route via 147N rather than as stated 147R.
You presumably did see the note re the fact that no overlaps were to be provided at signals on non-passenger lines (which obviously is not to current NR practice); I think that I would have missed that as I saw the SOL and full O/L and it was only when I thought you had surprisingly missed it entirely that I re-checked and found it myself. I’d definitely be tempted to call 131N, releasing that lock if an appropriate forward route set from 645 or alternatively make 131 auto-normalise; obviously other routes would be calling 131N to give themselves trapping and flank, but I would certainly “soft call” and I think set & lock but not detect.
I don’t see why the route box specifies that 615 is only to display Y rather than G up to 645 at Y, but you certainly followed this ok. However I don’t feel that this is good practice and hidden prescriptive notes like this which are really quite anachronistic are one of the things that annoys me about this paper. In SSI it basically costs nothing to give a full sequence whereas historically with RRI then there would be a cost so giving an incentive for not providing. I agree that in reality it would not change the speed profile (unusually no signal dimensions are given on the 2012 plan) but since there is a route directly to a platform then in real life then I’d have provided the better aspect. This is an example where I have a difficulty with the IRSE’s statement of “follow your practices” yet giving a layout and prescriptive details that basically mean that you can’t! The layout is a peculiar mixture with quite a few old practices but then shunt overlaps.
It’s picky (and you may be best dealing with via a general note) but you haven’t specified all the separate ends to be included when detecting points. I guess you should also have listed some brief assumptions on a general notes sheet renot including TPWS, the spacing of signals etc.
Similarly I think that you should have referred to 615’s aspect proving 619 is off before itself clearing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
686C
Another route that you did well. The only real quibbles are
a) in the list of tracks in the overlap over 127 reverse you seem to have written CK rather than DK,
b) for a terminal platform I think the A/L could have been 60seconds
c) it seems odd to me (but rather out of date on this nowadays) for shunt routes to main aspects have longer overlaps beyond them than the ROL when one is provided for the Warner- I guess that this is to standards but seems nonsense. Ditto when a route presets the exit signal, doesn’t seem valuable to worry about overlap route locking, but nothing wrong with what you have shown.
Well done for noting the potential for non-preferred routes and covering by a note; also for getting the swinging overlap correct- but perhaps a general note re “or swinging” would have been sensible.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I seem to have printed out two copies of the same route and omitted one; its getting late so I'll catch up with the outstanding when I can in the next couple of days. I had a few unanticipated distractions this weekend to deal with- sorry.
Overall you did well; it will just be a matter of making sure you can do it in the time. Its quite a time since I have dealt with Control Tables and coming back to them and thinking about them now only being one question in the module 3, frankly I'd opt for the written questions, but if you can be quick and reasonably thorough then at least you know in outline what you are going to have to do for that bit of the paper. Searching the plan for all those hidden notes though has become all the more of an overhead, given that it is now only 1/3rd of the paper so still need a fair bit of the 10 minutes reading tme to select your other questions.
PJW
(15-03-2013, 11:34 AM)dorothy.pipet Wrote: Added.
PJW