Robert

Abstract:

In addition to its collection of locomotives, passenger cars, freight cars and cabooses, the Arizona Railway Museum has an indoor display area. A central fixture is the console of a Centralized Traffic Control system which controlled Southern Pacific’s single track main line between Tucson, Arizona and Anapra, New Mexico, just outside of El Paso, Texas. Built in the late 1950s and used into the late 1980s the system was a tour de force of electromechanical engineering, but in the museum, it sat dark and quiet. This talk will describe the process of bringing to life its 1153, 14 V incandescent bulbs using modern electronics and some of the best features of the “maker” community to give museum visitors an audio-visual glimpse of how it functioned in its prime.

Biography:

Robert Ashton has worked in the electronics industry for over 40 years. He started in the integrated circuit development arm of AT&T Bell Laboratories and followed the unit in its spin offs to Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories and Agere Systems. In 2003 he joined White Mountain Labs, a small electronics testing company in Phoenix, and then finished his career with 10 years at ON Semiconductor. Since retirement he has remained active in the device testing standards committees of the Electrostatic Discharge Association and JEDEC. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from the University of Rhode Island and did post-doctoral work at Rutgers and Ohio State University. He has authored or co-authored numerous papers at IEEE and ESDA conferences and in trade publications.