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Telecommunications and Traffic Safety
Nowadays, the entire railway traffic in Sweden is controlled from train control centres. Previously, switches and signals were managed at the various stations. It was essential to secure the train’s route and ensure that a train departing from a station did not risk colliding with another train along the track. Therefore, it was crucial that stations along the line could quickly communicate with each other. This was initially done through telegraphing and later with telephones.
When the railway arrived in Sweden in the 1850s, the telegraph already existed. It was the first device invented to send and receive coded or written messages. All railway stations were equipped with telegraphs, interconnected via telegraph lines that ran along the railway lines.
Even after the telephone began to be used, the telegraph remained important for the railway. Safety messages were not trusted to be communicated verbally; they had to be done properly, in writing. It was not until 1929 that safety matters were allowed to be communicated by telephone.
In the early railways in England during the 1830s, there was no telegraph. Trains were dispatched on the line solely based on the timetable. The timetable was planned so that there would always only be one train on the line between two stations at a time. If, unexpectedly, there were two trains meeting on the line, the train closest to a station had to reverse back there. Speeds were considerably lower than today, but despite this, some accidents did occur.
Caption: Manual switching in Klippan in the 1920s.
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