Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

Happy 29th June - One day late as I was working with a customer yesterday.

This date, 29th June for me seems to be like November the 5th 1955 for Back To The Future.

I was at Selby railway station on the 29th June 1976 ( some 47 years ago) when myself and a friend noticed something dragging from an express train that was passing. This turned out to be that the end of the axle on one carriage bogie had sheared off. The frame of the bogie was dragging on the track and it ripped gouges in the wooden crossings that were across the tracks. Paul and myself went to the station master and told him what we had seen and that it was likely because of the state of the train that it would crash and kill/hurt a lot of people. He didn't want to believe us at first as we were 13 years old.

Some time was wasted whilst he looked at the large new gouges out of the wood. The station master then decided that we were right and rang to the signals and they stopped the train. It had travelled 6 miles north of Selby by then but had not reached 100 miles per hour. The train was stopped and it could not be moved until they detached the front half and sent that on to York and then detached the back half with a new Locomotive sent to get it. This had to travel backwards down the line. The broken carriage ended up next to the BOCM factory just outside of Selby. My dad worked at BOCM, Selby at the time and he took myself and my brothers to see it. I have a small polaroid photo but its not here in the office as I write this, so cannot show it today.

We were big news at the time, in all the newspapers of the day and the news TV. We were awarded a medal and British Rail sent us on two paid trips; the TV came to see us leave on one of those trips and passengers sent us letters thanking us.

Also on the 29th June 1995 (some 28 years ago) I passed my honours degree in Electronics with First class honours. My final year project was to write a real time operating system in C and Assembler. This was written from the end of 1994 and during 1995.

So, the 29th June seems to be special for me; saving lives and getting a 1st class honours degree!!

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