Heritage Operations Processing System, Heritage Ops, or HOPS, is a web-based tool for the day-to-day running and management of preserved and heritage railways. The system was developed, from a concept drawn up by Danny Scroggins and Luke Cartey.

Founding and development

The HOPS Project began early in August 2009 in the rostering office of the

signalling In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon. Any quantity that can vary over space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers. The ''IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing'' ...

department at the

Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway The Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway (GWR, GWSR or Gloucs-Warks Steam Railway) is a volunteer-run heritage railway which runs along the Gloucestershire/Worcestershire border of the Cotswolds, England. The GWSR has restored and reo ...

– who embraced the use of the technology.

Beta testing Software testing is the act of examining the artifacts and the behavior of the software under test by validation and verification. Software testing can also provide an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to apprecia ...

began in January 2010 with a small group of volunteers, the group being enlarged later that year. After this bedding-in period, the system was made more widely available to other UK heritage railways in January 2011. The purpose of the system is to provide administration tools associated with operating functions on heritage railways, such as staff rostering, timetabling and competence management, document control, etc. The system assists railways in meeting the requirements of government legislation such as the Railways and Other Guided Transport Systems (Safety) Regulations 2006 (ROGS) which were introduced in Great Britain to put the 2004 European Railway Safety Directive into practice. The system assists with competency management (as a requirement of the

Safety Management System A safety management system (SMS) is designed to manage safety risk in the workplace, occupational safety being defined as the reduction of risk to a level that is as low as is reasonably practicable or ALARP to prevent people getting hurt. De ...

). The ethos of the development of the system has been that in the majority of cases, producing large-scale data-handling and storage facilities, with the appropriate level of security, access, backups, etc., would not be economical for an individual railway. A single program, in use by many railway companies, however, would make the investment economical. The system has grown significantly in the five years it has been in development, mainly in response to feedback from users and demands of the industry, and promises to continue to develop on the same lines in the future.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:HOPS Rail technologies Information systems Workflow applications Transportation planning Public transport information systems