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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: STLMD who wrote (414)	11/12/1997 7:54:00 AM
From: Steve Rubakh	Respond to of 9818

Railroads are in trouble Bug to send trains off the rails By Giles Turnbull, New Media Correspondent, PA News The millennium bug threatening computers in all aspects of industry could hit train services 18 months early - in May 1998 - unless swift action is taken, rail industry bosses have warned. Railtrack is unable to say whether a full train service will be operating in January 2000, because there are so many unknown variables. At a conference hosted by Railtrack, industry executives were given stark warnings that they needed to begin urgently allocating funds and resources to tackling the problem. Practically every computer system owned by Railtrack and the various other companies involved in providing train services will be affected in some way by the millennium bug - a glitch in computer systems that means many computers will not recognise 2000 as a valid date. Company executives predict the cost of upgrading all the computers will be "tens of millions of pounds" - but that is a conservative figure. The longer the delay before action is taken, the higher the bill. Railtrack has begun by setting up a small team to analyse the extent of the problem. Its main aim is to encourage the sharing of information among rail companies to ensure that all the different systems are compatible after 1999. Campbell Morrison, Year 2000 programme manager for Railtrack, admitted that there were no guarantees as yet about the provision of services in January 2000. "Having said that, no-one can predict much about it - if the power stations break down we'll have trouble running trains even if we are millennium compliant," he said. Another problem facing the rail industry is that the Train Service Database, which controls and compiles nationwide timetables, works 18 months in advance, meaning that it had to be millennium compliant by summer 1998. Mr Morrison said he was confident that the database, and other key computer systems, would be ready in time. Some were more important than others, and a priority list was being made to ensure that the most vital systems were checked first, he said. That did not necessarily mean that all the rail industry's systems would be checked by the onset of the next century, he added. :: Travel to the continent may be even more difficult because of the millennium bug, according to a computer expert attending the conference. Gary Easterbrook, of Millennium UK, a consulting company working with Railtrack on the Year 2000 problem, told a press conference after the meeting that he was concerned about the lack of action on the problem in Europe. "It's quite alarming in Europe," he said. "I think the Scandanavians are doing quite well, but awareness of the problem in Europe as a whole is lower than it is in the UK, particularly in France. "Generally Europe is about nine months behind the UK." ÿ c Copyright 1997 Press Association Ltd. All rights reserved.