In 1989, the Hong Kong Goverment Port
and Airport development Study (PADS) chose the island of
Chek Lap Kok off the north coast of Lantau island as the
site for Hong Kong's new airport. In
1995 work started on the building of a new airport at Lantau Island just
off Hong Kong to replace the famous Kai Tak airport with its notoriously
difficult approach for aircraft. This required new rail and road links. The new
rail link was provided by MTR (Mass Transit Railway system) who put a new high
speed link from Hong Kong Island to the new airport. This required new state of
the art ticketing systems provided by the UK firm Thorn Transit in Wells
Somerset.
Click on the above picture for
MTRs website in Hong Kong.
My responsibility was to write all of the communications protocols between
the Ticket Issuing machines and station turnstiles using TCP/IP communications. I
provided my colleagues with a common object oriented communications
channel interface into both RPC and Berkeley Socket based communications. This was
written in C++ on a Sun Solaris platform. The station equipment consisted of
turnstiles with an Intel processor running rhe
QNX
embedded operating system. This allowed all ticket
transactions to be uploaded to the station computer real
time. I also integrated the Octopus ticket machines to the
station computer using Sun RPC's. I also wrote some CGI
scripts using ESQL-C to interface into a Oracle
database.
I was out in Hong Kong for nearly two
months testing the systems. I was responsible for carrying
out integration tests between the station computer and the
ticket machines at Tsuen Wan railway terminal. Below are some photos that
illustrate how interesting and difficult the final approach was to the
runway at Kai Tak and why the new airport was so badly
needed.
