Kent & East Sussex Railway

Will people please stop using abreveations.RR I take as run round.PNB.?. If it's too much bother to use the English language,why bother a all .?

 

PNB I believe is Personal Needs Break

 

Gordon Bennett. I hope they remembered to WTH when they'd finished.

 

RR I had to guess but pretty easy. PNB is a standard railway abbreviation just like SPAD, AWS & TOPS, to name a few.

 

So sorry, after 23 years (1974 - 1997) on the railways, the standard abbreviations are second nature.
One forgets that others do not have that background.

 

Indeed.
RR = Run round
TE = Turnover engine.
SR = Shunt release.

All those were common at termini, such as Waterloo, the incoming loco might run round at some locations to work back, but might just uncouple and wait for the train loco to arrive L||E, or a station pilot might have to remove the stock to release the inward loco to work the train.


(I was responsible for publishing boat trains for a few years.)
eg. B25 09:06 (Q. )Waterloo to Soton W Docks, will run , Union Castle.

 

When my older brother was at diagrams office Beckenham, he said that SDPO, which was supposed to be Shut Down & Pass Off, was known to drivers as Shut Down & Piss Off.

 

The front pages of WTT (Working TimeTable) books, often took up two pages of abbreviations which were referenced to the timing columns.

 

Perhaps one should give equal weight to SPG?

 

The only problem with abbreviating is that it all depends on one's background/experience.

 

Quite, hence the irony!

 

And in a Railway section of a forum, one could be excused to expect a common background or familiarity........


Mind you, my early railway experience was entirely on the Southern Region. Other regions differed.
I recall a fellow volunteer at Quainton, who worked with Royal Mail, saying something to me about "the double Ace of Spades". My response was a blank. He was used to dealing with TPOs , and knew that they were designated in the WTT with a "Double Ace of Spades" symbol. He didn't realise that each WTT only listed the symbols or other abbreviations which were relevant to the timings in that individual WTT. I had never seen that symbol listed in any of the WTT books I had worked with. As his experience was not on the Southern, he likewise would never have seen the traction designated as DL, EL (yes, I am old enough to have observed cl 71 locos entering the sidings at Hoo Jn), nor L//D , L//E etc.

Of course later in my career, I had access to LMR WTT, so did see that symbol for the TPO.

 

Wasn’t SPG Vyvyan’s pet hamster in The Young Ones?

Tom

 

Special Patrol Group, as per @Wenlock 's post.

 

Certainly when I started with BR in the 1980’s it was always said that the railway ran on TLA’s. (three letter acronyms)!
You gradually got to know them through experience although when Railtrack came along, there were so many people brought into it that came from other industries/organisations that had different meanings for the same acronyms that various “idiots guides” were produced, including one I think that was published by Ian Allan.
It was also deemed essential in BR days that when a major project team was created that a suitable title/acronym was created, usually for use on the official project tie or mug!
One BR initiative that had to be rapidly renamed was “Organisation for Quality”. If you say the TLA for that out loud you may realise why…..

I remember some years later, post privatisation, that when bidding for work on a potential railway project in Australia, a great deal of effort was spent seeing if we could come up with a scheme title that abbreviated to “STREWTH”!

 

Playing with acronyms was always popular.
When BR decided to move over to computerised consignment details, to replace physical wagon labels and triplicate consignment orders, I accompanied an "implementation manager" for a while.

The scheme was called "Consign Through Tops" (CTT). The manager I mentioned was due for retirement and only paying lip service to upper management. He referred to the scheme as "Consign Under New Tops System"!

 

Very early in my career I worked for a small(ish) manufacturing company. At a meeting about new products the MD summed up the discussion as “so what we need is a Cheap S**t Unit for the export market”.

The R&D man wrote down ‘CSU’ and took it to his team. The eventual product was in fact neither C nor S but we exported lots of them, still with the ‘CSU’ product name.