On Sun, 28 May 2006, Neil Williams wrote:

Tom Anderson wrote:

That seems really quite perverse. Is there a reason for all this?

Yes. It's because the clocks (like the standard BR/NSE 8-segment ones)
are centrally controlled. However, to make things simpler, a control
pulse is only sent once every minute (thus moving the minute hand on)
rather than once every second. Thus, the second hand is on a local
motor, and to ensure it doesn't get out of sync it's set to go around in
about 58 seconds rather than a complete minute.

Bloody hell; that really is a twisted, Heath-Robinson, arse-backwards
piece of engineering. Presumably, the Swiss railway subcontracted its
clocks to British engineers!


tom

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