Memory Lane
Probationers share the ideas they are building and the first things they got right. Serving and retired officers walk back down the line — to the postings, the people and the numbers that stayed with them. React, comment, and add your own.
From probation
For our project at IRIFM we built a live cash-flow view for a division, reading straight from the accounts data. The DRM asked for it to stay on after we left. Small, but it is the first thing I built that a railway actually used.
Sixty of us from every service on the Himalayan trek, and the only thing anyone wanted to know from the IRAS officers was whether the railway really loses money on passengers. We had answers by the summit.
Every workshop we visited kept its own spreadsheet for unit costs. We drafted a common template and two workshops have adopted it. Proposing it here in case a zone wants to try it at scale.
Down memory lane
During probation at Madras we closed the March accounts by hand, with the power gone and a row of hurricane lamps along the desks. Nobody left before the trial balance agreed. I have never trusted a number as much as I trusted that one.
The Senior DFM insisted every probationer ride the footplate once. 'You cannot cost what you have not seen.' Thirty years on I still think about fuel and crew hours with the sound of that engine in my ears.
We were told the machine would replace a room of clerks. Instead it made the clerks the most sought-after people in the building, because only they knew what the numbers meant. That lesson has outlived the machine.
