MIRACULOUS MACHINE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22422, 17 November 1934, Page 16

MIRACULOUS MACHINE

REFUSES TO BE WRONG A monster is hidden away inside a wooden bridge in Paddington Station. It is a machine so miraculous that the girls who work it do not understand it. Neither do even the cleverest officials of the Great Western Railway. It is the mechanism that works the train arrival indicator. In one room is a great thing like a fine-mesh, old-fashioned mattress, standing upright. Down the left side are the numbers 1 to 99, each representing a train. Train No. 57 may be from Torquay, stopping at Newton Abbott, Exeter, Taunton, Westbury, and Reading, due in Paddington 3.25. The girl at the switchboard moves levers numbered five and seven and presses a button, and immediately the slats in the platform indicator revolve till they give that information, then stay still. First thing every morning the girl moves a lever to the name of the day. If on a Wednesday she presses levers and buttons for a train that does not run on Wednesday, the machine refuses to record it. Until she has pressed a button labelled “ Cancel ” it will take no further notice of her. How the monster knows all this nobody, except perhaps the wizard who designed it, has been able to fathom. Mies Mary Miller, one of the four girls who know how to handle the machine, said to a newspaper representative: “I have been working the machine for five months and I still cannot make out how it does lots of things. At Easter, when it had been installed only four days, I nearly went out of my senses with it. Even now I do not think I will ever quite believe that it is true.