GoA4
When I started working in the railway industry, during the first few weeks, I was told that the metro system I was working on was GoA4. Alright, I thought, this is GoA4. Whatever that means.
Over the years that piece of information becomes embedded and is accepted as the universal truth. One of the first few adjectives that came to be used to describe the signalling systems that we were working on.
In 2021 I heard the first time of ETCS (European Train Control Systems) when I started my masters in the UK. While I was stills struggling to remember the terms – “Is it ECTS or CETS?”, I wondered the first few weeks – my colleagues are discussing the different levels, the intricacies and history of the systems. Needless to say, I was far behind and I felt very left behind. Life however goes on and I came to learn what ETCS is all about, although there is still much more to learn. Hence I have been joining study groups discussing about signalling and all the systems it ‘contains.’
One of the speaker during the study group is very knowledgeable in the field and can answer almost any questions thrown to him. However during a recent session, he was explaining about the different level of GoA and said that to his knowledge, there is no signalling systems that is at level 4, i.e. GoA, yet.
Wait, what?
A few in the audience said that they are working on some GoA4 systems. Still, I thought, that is not true. GoA4 has been done years ago, well before I started working, hence how it was accepted as gospel when I started working, that we were working on such a system.
The speaker continued and said thank you for the info, adding it to his knowledge. I thought there and then, well, there are things that he didn’t know, it seems. I then checked myself and thought that it is actually quite natural for anyone not to know everything (or almost everything) in a field of knowledge! Also it seems that certain things we take for granted, my be alien and novel to another person. In fact, it is most likely so. Unless that is, you are only interacting with people who are only doing the same things that you do. Even then, different people will have different views, but that is another story. Universal accepted truth, is paradoxically, localized.
I thank Allah, alhamdulillah, to be exposed to a lot of things and I pray that in the future when I don’t know (and there will be), I am given the chance to learn. insyaAllah.
Thank you for reading.
Note: GoA4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation#Grades_of_Automation