Adoption By British Railways
In the mid to late 1960s British Railways (subsequently rebranded British Rail) was searching around for ways to increase efficiency, and came across the TOPS system in a 1968 presentation by an IBM US Transportation Industry Representative who shortly after formed IBM World Trade Corp's Transportation Industry Centre in Brussels (E. Wrathall). They purchased the system (along with source code, as was typical for such a large mainframe-based system in those days) and implemented it, assisted by Southern Pacific IT experts. At the time, the British Government operated a "Buy British" policy for the nationalised industries, and the purchase of an IBM 360 mainframe to operate TOPS had to be approved by the Cabinet of Prime Minister Edward Heath.
The adoption of the TOPS system made for some changes in the way the railway system in Britain worked. Hitherto, locomotives were numbered in three different series. Steam locomotives carried unadorned numbers up to five digits long. Diesel locomotives carried one to four-digit numbers prefixed with a letter 'D', and electric locomotives with a letter 'E'. Thus, up to three locomotives could carry the same number. TOPS could not handle this, and it also required similar locomotives to be numbered in a consecutive series in terms of classification, in order that they might be treated together as a group.
Read more about this topic: TOPS
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