Along with my work colleagues at the time I operated the Solari board at London Waterloo station for a period at the beginning of my career with BR. They were operated by inserting a suitably punched card into a card reader. The holes in the cards represented the codes that activated the various flaps.
Many a night shift was spent cutting holes in blank cards to represent the changing calling patterns for service alterations the following day. Saturday nights could be particularly fraught with changes caused by rail replacement bus services (these were just as common then as now). Then there was the twice a year ritual of scanning the draft timetables for changes to calling patterns that couldn't be shown using the existing flaps - new flaps having to be ordered in good time for the timetable changes. It was also a challenge for the Solari operators if the service became severely disrupted for whatever reason. Blank cards would be frantically punched to try to match the improvised train services put together by Control, train crew and station supervisors with whatever resources they could muster with little notice before departure.
It was preferred to have a card represent each train though there was an override that allowed time and platform to be manually updated. There was even an early version of Sonia in the solari panel allowing automated annoucements. Thankfully, this facility was not regularly used because it broke down an announcements into sections which caused the announcements to be punctuated by pauses of various lengths -
The train at platform..........................11 is the .......1530....to..........Weymouth calling at ....Southampton and Bournemouth ................where the train will divide. Please travel in the front.........four coaches for................
The Waterloo Solari operating panel was split into a main line side and a Windsor line side in the Supervisors office (underneath the gateline of platform 8). As this was track side of the actual indicator the only way to know if a train was showing incorrectly was if a member of platform staff noticed or it was spotted if a CCTV camera was trained on the Board. It was not uncommon for flaps to stick showing an inappropriate set of station calling points. Also not all the indicators that made up the board had identical flaps so putting a card in the reader and pressing a button on the operators panel that activated an incorrect board could produce some interesting services.
Even more fun would be had if drinks got spilled over the operating desk. The resulting complete failure of the indicator board would require all the flaps to be manually flipped to blank by a man up a ladder until the reason for the short circuit had dried out or the failed component changed. In the meantime the train announcer got rather busy. Changes in the weather from cold to hot and humid and vice versa also caused the board to fail as condensation got into the circuitry. Happy days
I thought Waterloo was not replaced until after Liverpool Street but stand corrected if this is not the case.
