Press-button Teleprinters Save £7,000 a Year
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APART from greatly speeding up message handlirig, the new London pressbutton teleprinter centre of British Road Services in City Road, E.C.1, officially opened last week by Mr. C. Barrington, a member of the board of B.R.S., has reduced operating costs by £1,000 a year The centre, the setting up of which was announced in The Commercial Motor on January 24, is on the fourth floor of an old parcels warehouse. The site is being re-developed, and will ultimately form the, headquarters for the South-Eastern Division and London District of British Road Services, and of B.R.S. (Contracts), Ltd., and B.R.S. Parcels, Ltd.
The new press-button tape transfer system is the first to be engineered by the British Post Office and is believed to be the most up-to-date in Europe. All messages entering the centre are passed to other centres in Glasgow and throughout England and Wales, or to destinations in London, by pressing a button. If a line is engaged, the apparatus automatically stores the message and delivers it as soon as the route becomes free.
Most of the messages concern vehicle movements. B.R.S. operating efficiency has been greatly increased by the facility with which the departure of vehicles may be notified to their destinations and a copy of the message sent to the local traffic control point.
Thirty principal message centres are strategically placed throughout the country. They are linked by duplex tape relay circuits, which allow messages to be sent simultaneously in both directions over a single channel. Punched paper tape is employed and automatic transmitters obviate waiting for through connect ions.
The whole network is controlled from London. There are two main tape transfer centres, one in London to serve England, Wales and Glasgow, and the other in Glasgow to serve Scotland.
Most message centres have a local secondary network, so that messages may be exchanged with B.R.S. offices and depots and with local customers.
The secondary" n et w or k includes private-wire teleprinter, international Telex, photographed messages by telegraph, telephone, pneumatic tube and hand delivery.
The City ,Road centre contains examples of all the teleprinter methods employed by B.R.S. It is the principal transfer centre for the long-distance tape relay network. It is also a transfer and documentation point for messages coming in from the long-distance network to B.R.S. offices or customers in the London secondary system, extending from Windsor to Mareate and from Bishop's Stortford to Brighton.
Its third function is as a transfer and documentation point for messages from any B.R.S. office or depot, or from any customer within the London system, addressed to B.R.S. anywhere in the United Kingdom.
Many Advantages Press-button tape relay has many advantages. A message from, say, Glasgow to Southampton arrives in London as a printed and perforated tape. The operator severs the tape, reads the route code, puts it into any of her six auto-transmitters and presses the Southampton button. A 60-word message can be delivered from Glasgow to Southampton in about 2+ minutes.
About 4,000 tapes, representing nearly 250,000 words, are handled each day. The level of traffic is now about 25 per cent. higher than last year. Experiments have been started with the use of the network during the night to transmit accounting data to centralized electronic computing centres.
It is expected that press-button control will be introduced in Glasgow in May. A new centre is under construction. It will incorporate a torn-tape press-button console, developed by the Post Office for medium-sized installations.
A girl will sit at five receiving printing reperforators and a three-gang automatic transmitter arranged in U formation. She will tear completed tapes from the reperforators and automatically retransmit them to any of 10 destinations through a press-button route-selector panel. The conversion will improve service in Scotland and reduce costs.
The press-button system just introduced may remain in service for about five years. After that it may be superseded by fully automatic electronic storage. By this method, teleprinter impulses would be switched and routed through a magnetic drum which could be "wiped clean" and used indefinitely.