I recently watched both the 1974 and 2009 versions of The Taking of Pelham 123 and it really stood out how the industrial designs of their respective eras helped elevate the original[1][2] in comparison to the remake[3][4].
Does anyone know how these actually worked under the hood? Was it essentially just a mounting solution, and you wire them up how you need on the back, or were they essentially pluggable modules with some kind of control system attached to the board? I can't imagine it's the second option, given the timeframe, but I kinda want to see a system like that now
The former, although there is usually some system with change control documentation for the actual rat's nest behind the panel; the panel mounts themselves can be remarkably modular with swappable and stackable contact switches, etc.
These very distinctly remind me of electric/electronic didactic "toys" from the at least 80s. Plastic cubes, containing a single (usually) circuit component, like switches, resistors, lights, coils, or just wire, with bare metal connectors on relevant sides and a symbol on top. You got a whole bag of them, as well as a gridded board you inserted the cubes into. Could make even usable stuff like simple radios.
To add to this, those signalling panels (SpDr is the series, I think) work on the principle “from where to were”: you hold down the button for the signal that is showing red, then press the button for the track you want to direct the train to. The system then checks if that doesn’t cross an already-configured path of another train (if so, it refuses to do anything), then sets the relevant track switches as required and finally changes the light on the signal.
The marker is on one of the destination buttons to remind the signaller not to send any trains there, because that might endanger the people working there.
> Don’t you just want to rotate it, no matter what it does?
A grandparent's house had light switches that looked kind of like this but black (bakelite). And they are very satisfying, a good amount of resistance while rotating, then click.
When I was a kid, I spotted one on the exterior wall of a store near where I lived; it sat there for many years and got painted over at least twice before someone eventually removed it. As far as I could tell even then, it was long disconnected and didn't do anything - but it was hell of a fun to stop by each time and just turn it around a few times.
There's really so much physicality to interacting with objects that we've lost as we switch to more and more touch screens and capacitive buttons. Also the reassuring "thunk" of a nice chunky button to confirm you've pressed it is just so important to user confidence
These physical controls do still exist, where it absolutely has to work. I took a photo of a pretty nice physical control panel at a fairly new ride at Disneyland recently. The modularity and tactile oversized buttons and switches were really cool. I built an art car for Burning Man and used similar industrial controls, they look cool and are really rugged.
Check out this chunky industrial Bakelite switch with a resonant thunking spring clicking action that you have to overshoot each of the four rotations by 45 degrees before it clicks. It feels so good, it's nice to just turn around and around just for pure audio and kinesthetic pleasure. So much better than a Tesla iPad control. (Never mind the gorilla!)
It's from the Amsterdam Bakelite Collection, founded/curated by Reindert Groot. It isn't actually a museum you can visit at this moment, but it's a huge beautiful collection, with lots of interesting photos and articles and newsletters online, and parts of it surface in museums around the world from time to time.
There are some beautiful photos in the newsletters, like the colossal steel 1500 Kg two-part injection mold, and the restored SAAL Soft SPEAKER with the Bakelite Bell:
That restoration work on the speaker and the paper box is so well done. I spent some time under the Rijksmuseum in the workshops and the people there are similarly skilled and it was very impressive to see them at work, infinite patience and the result of all that work as invisible as possible. That's the bit that really got me, good restorers don't have any fingerprints, their biggest successes are the works that look like they were never worked on in the first place. Which is almost the opposite of every other form of creative art, and yet, they are amongst the best in the field.
That transformer from last link about the phone looks like it was made yesterday.
>This big industrial switch toggled between day and night. I don’t know if it changed the operation of the system, or is just switched on some sort of a dark mode for the panel itself:
I think we can answer that with 'yes, it changed the operation of the system. The indicator next to it is labeled in Amperes and 30 Amps is a lot of current. depending on the driving voltage at 24 V (pretty common for control panels like this one) that's 700W give or take and if it is a line voltage (220 V in poland at the time) that 6.6KW.
I know a few things about German signal boxes, and I doubt the Polish ones will be too different in this regard.
Railway signals have a “daytime” and a lower “nighttime” intensity to make sure that the driver sees the red signal in the summer sun, but doesn’t get blinded by the same red signal on their final run of the day at midnight. The switching between these intensities is done on the signaling panel and I assume that’s what the big switch is for.
Hmm. Is this why rail maps tend to look like circuit traces?
It’d kind of make sense for the operator status map to look like the map you hand out, or put in stations. The design is an abstraction good enough for understanding switching status for operators, why not for riders trying to get to Manhattan Beach?
Maybe every abstraction is a finite state machine, and we can construct an analog circuit of any of them. I have an opinion about metrics where they are not the data, but the emergent analog signal from a system.
The idea of collecting data and deriving metrics from it is absurd when you look at your system as a thing that has inputs and an output and the line for the output goes up or down over time. The beauty of these industrial systems is that the makers understood this principle. The system produces a signal that bears meaning that these interfaces express.
[1] - https://media.doblu.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Taking-of...
[2] - https://ilarge.lisimg.com/image/21019979/1118full-the-taking...
[3] - https://c8.alamy.com/comp/K3KWM1/the-taking-of-pelham-123-da...
[4] - https://press.moviewalker.jp/api/resizeimage/content/main/mv...
A "Rotte" is the crew working on railway construction. So I assume this is a label to warn that personnel is on the tracks
The marker is on one of the destination buttons to remind the signaller not to send any trains there, because that might endanger the people working there.
A grandparent's house had light switches that looked kind of like this but black (bakelite). And they are very satisfying, a good amount of resistance while rotating, then click.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o_n5W2I2p_M
It's from the Amsterdam Bakelite Collection, founded/curated by Reindert Groot. It isn't actually a museum you can visit at this moment, but it's a huge beautiful collection, with lots of interesting photos and articles and newsletters online, and parts of it surface in museums around the world from time to time.
http://www.amsterdambakelitecollection.com/
There are some beautiful photos in the newsletters, like the colossal steel 1500 Kg two-part injection mold, and the restored SAAL Soft SPEAKER with the Bakelite Bell:
http://www.amsterdambakelitecollection.com/newsletter202411/...
Other interesting Bakelite links from previous Hacker News discussions:
1956 Philips 353A Bakelite Vacuum Tube Radio Repair & Restoration
https://retrorepairsandrefurbs.com/2022/09/06/1956-philips-3...
Bakelite to the Future - 1950s rotary phone ESP32 bluetooth headset
https://blog.waleson.com/2024/10/bakelite-to-future-1950s-ro...
That transformer from last link about the phone looks like it was made yesterday.
The photos on that article are nice inspiration for some pseudo-steampunk/vacuumpunk stuff.
I think we can answer that with 'yes, it changed the operation of the system. The indicator next to it is labeled in Amperes and 30 Amps is a lot of current. depending on the driving voltage at 24 V (pretty common for control panels like this one) that's 700W give or take and if it is a line voltage (220 V in poland at the time) that 6.6KW.
Railway signals have a “daytime” and a lower “nighttime” intensity to make sure that the driver sees the red signal in the summer sun, but doesn’t get blinded by the same red signal on their final run of the day at midnight. The switching between these intensities is done on the signaling panel and I assume that’s what the big switch is for.
It’d kind of make sense for the operator status map to look like the map you hand out, or put in stations. The design is an abstraction good enough for understanding switching status for operators, why not for riders trying to get to Manhattan Beach?
https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/london-stories/h...
The idea of collecting data and deriving metrics from it is absurd when you look at your system as a thing that has inputs and an output and the line for the output goes up or down over time. The beauty of these industrial systems is that the makers understood this principle. The system produces a signal that bears meaning that these interfaces express.
Not related to Astro the templating engine.