Total Operations Processing System

Total Operations Processing System, or TOPS, is a computer system for managing the locomotives and (railroad cars) owned by and/or operated on a rail system. It was originally developed by the American-based Southern Pacific Railroad and was widely sold; it is best known in Britain for its use by British Rail (BR) and its successors.

The Southern Pacific Railroad was ahead of the pack in its embracing of technology. In the early 1960s, it developed a computer system called 'Total Operations Processing System', or 'TOPS'. The purpose was to take all the paperwork associated with a locomotive or - its maintenance history, its allocation to division and depot and duty, its status, its location, and much more - and keep it in computer form, constantly updated by terminals at every maintenance facility. On paper, this information was difficult to keep track of, difficult to keep up to date, and difficult to query; requiring many telephone calls. Computerizing this information enabled a railroad to keep better track of its assets, and to utilize them better.

In order to offset the development costs of the system, Southern Pacific sold it to other railroads. A number of American railroads took to the system, as did many others around the world.

In the mid to late 1960s, British Rail (BR) was searching around for ways to increase efficiency, and came across the TOPS system in a 1968 presentation by an IBM US Transportation Industry Representative, who shortly after, formed IBM World Trade Corp's Transportation Industry Centre in Brussels (E. Wrathall). They purchased the system (along with source code, as was typical for such a large mainframe-based system in those days) and implemented it, assisted by Southern Pacific data processing experts. At the time, the British Government operated a 'Buy British' policy for the nationalised industries, and the purchase of an IBM System/360 mainframe to operate TOPS had to be approved by the Cabinet of Prime Minister Edward Heath.

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