Inside the Abandoned Control Room That Once Powered Britain's Railways
Woking Electrical Control Room (2016)
Photographer Darbians explores the derelict Woking Electrical Control Room, a relic of railway infrastructure. The control wall, where each location represented a substation or transformer, still stands, along with vintage phones, a switchboard, and a hand-cranked winder used to power calls. The photographer recalls how such rooms helped power his childhood train journeys. The images capture the eerie beauty of a bygone era.
I know some of my journeys as a child were helped along by this.
- LastTrain
If, like me, you were wondering what the room /actually/ looks like: https://www.flickr.com/photos/132123913@N03/albums/721577110...
- xg15
It's great that so much about those old control rooms is posted here lately!
One thing I notice is how much efforts had been spent to illustrate both the current status of the system, but also it's overall structure and how the two relate - i.e. the actual components of the facility.
Almost all of the dashboards here have some kind of graph, showing the wiring or plumbing between components, or in case of railway control, the railway lines. The graph acts like a map on which status indicators or switches can be placed.
Compare that to modern software "dashboards" which are full of complicated charts showing various metrics, but almost never show the structure of the system.
- SoftTalker
Misread the title as "Working" control room, and was ready to be amazed that something like that from the first half of the last century was still in use... and not even a PC or screen to be found. But, it was decomissioned in 1997.
Really interesting how depression-era infrastructure like that was still built with so much attention to aesthetic design.
Today it would just be screens on a wall, industrial carpet floor, drop-tile ceiling with LED lights, a few Steelcase cubicles for the operators and little else.