The train now making a lot of noise is the 11:16...

Sometimes you have the right tool at the right time, in the right place. But this is a rare event.

So I was rather gratified when I was travelling by train recently, and I tried to listen to a podcast on my iPhone. Headphones in, I turned it on and listened... and strained to hear...and turned it up to max, and still couldn't hear it unless I cupped my hands over my ears.

The problem? Not my hearing, but the train I was travelling in. It was a single carriage train - the 11:16 from Ipswich to Cambridge. And it was loud inside. Very loud. So loud that listening to an iPhone turned up to max volume was not really audible on headphones against the din coming from the diesel motor.

For once, I had the right tool - well, almost the right tool. I had downloaded 'Decibel' from the App Store some days earlier, and had casually seen how noisy it was at work and at home, but nothing more than casual use, and I hadn't calibrated it. But now I had a noise to measure, and the highest average reading I got was 89, although it was consistently above 86 for most of the journey. The conductor was very good at SHOUTING to the travelling customers, or is that victims of ear assault?

Now I'm not an expert in environmental noise, but it was very noisy in that train, and it made the 88 minute journey all the longer to have to put up with a loud companion... Not a pleasant experience.

Trains, Tube and Blobs

Some weeks ago, I sent a twitter 'tweet' pondering the reason behind the closure of Blackfriars tube station in London for three years, and got a fascinating tweet back that told me that there was no such tube station, and never had been. Nuff said, it seemed.

But I was recently able to talk to someone who is in the 'Trains' specialist group (known as a 'professional network') of the IET, the Institute of Engineering and Technology. The IET are the people who you talk to in order to reach the cream of the engineering profession - so you get straight answers from people who know. So I asked two obvious questions: why was Blackfriars closed?; and why do trains always seem to be replaced by buses at weekends?

Actually, the answers are pretty obvious once you think about them in the right way... This is probably because engineering is often about completely understanding the problem first...

Trying to completely rebuild a busy Tube station in situ in these days of very protective safety legislation seems like a recipe for accidents, or else is going to increase the duration of the work. With this in mind, then a few years seems less unreasonable.

Weekend 'rail replacement' buses seem strange given the apparent increases in the number of people who seem to want to use the train at weekends in our 24-7 'world in recession'. But given that the alternative is either closing down the rail network earlier at might, or doing the work during the week, then the weekend seems like the logical time to do it. But then, when you think deeper, you wonder why there's so much maintenance needed? Maybe the answer is to look beyond fixing the immediate symptoms and fix the underlying problem...

All of which wonderfully illustrates what I think engineering is really all about. It isn't necessarily about getting your hands dirty, or making the tallest, widest or longest something. Instead, it is more about thinking about how and why things work the way they do (or don't), and particularly about understanding how and why things interact (or don't interact) in the ways they do. Try searching for 'IET: Beware of the Monkeys' on YouTube for another example...

Which brings me to my final engineering question of this blog posting: Why do chefs always make the blobs of fruit coulis different sizes?