Toll Memories

The Control Centre back in the day

One of my (few) claims to fame is that I wrote some of the software that used to manage toll collection on the Humber Bridge. Ian wrote the control room software, Siemens programmed the toll booths and I wrote the management interface.

This is my bit

It was great fun. It ran for quite a few years and only failed once, when someone testing the uninterruptable power supply sent a DC spike to all the devices and blew up the power supplies for the network routers. I had to go in and move some wires around to get it going again.

The rest of the time it just worked, registering tolls, indicating when the number of axles detected on a vehicle didn’t match the class the booth operator had entered and producing summary data. We closed it down a few years ago.

I was reminded of this when I paid for some crossings today. I had to download and use an app, of course. You can pay for you crossings in advance, which is nice, but you don’t know whether the crossings you paid for have registered properly until two days after the crossing, which is one day after the deadline for paying for the crossing. Which seems a bit odd to me. I’ll just have to hope that the people who built the new system are as good at their jobs as Ian and I were all those years ago.