Point normalisation alarm

" said:

Buzzer to remind us to normalise the points is broken in real life at the moment, so the amount of times we must forget to normalise the points into and out of Lovers Walk depot and lock it up so they can't move things around must be doing the shunt panel operators head in by now.

Oh, is that the reason? I assumed it was for safety reasons, to do with preventing runaways!

Where, in the RCC or in the towers? That sounds like a non-vital check to me.

BTW if you are wondering "why" things are the way they are, my friend worked in the TA's front office. Management considers the signaling system a form of "manual ATO" that aims to reduce the amount of skill necessary to safely/effectively operate a subway train. They have also proactively slowed the system down to prevent rulebook slowdowns. In Boston the unions have much more clout because if the Green Line is operated to rule the service completely breaks down. In NYC the TA has basically gotten the public used to bad service as the standard taking away the union's only weapon in a no-strike state.

Whatever location is in control acknowledges the alarm, be it local tower, master tower, or central office.

True it is a non-vitally derived indication. I was speaking to your point about the tower operator's involvement in the process. The point of the data-recorded-acknowledge is to put the acknowledging party "on the hook" "on the record" that they were aware that the overrun was sanctioned.

I appreciate the insight above, the general degradation of system efficiency concerns me deeply as a rider and as an employee/contractor of NYCT. But IMHO, based on my first-hand experience you are connecting dots that aren't connected. Every transit and rail property is treating human operators as more and more, well, human - fallible. Not just NYCT. The politics of rail accidents dictate that "something most be done to prevent this from happening again" and although some problems may be fundamentally unsolvable managers must be able to point to a "thing that was done", like axle-counting speed enforcement systems, data-recorded overrun acknowledgements, or point normalisation alarms.

You see it's not an "overrun" because the most restrictive indication an automatic can display is Stop and Proceed.

There are only 4 historic subway systems in the country, NYCTA, Boston, Philly and Chicago.

BTW I got the low down on the switch to the composite brake shoes which increased stopping distances and required the massive round of speed reductions since the Williamsburg bridge incident.