By Peter Clark (Director -Otari Electronics Ltd)
In July 1977, I (at the time an employee of New Zealand Railways -NZR ) was driving back to Wellington at night from Wanganui. Along the stretch of road between Paekakariki and Pukerua Bay a large boulder sitting in the middle of the road destroyed the car (punched holes in the radiator, sump, floor and removed the rear axle). After alighting from the wreck, my passenger and I walked back down the road to ensure the boulder was moved to safety. Getting back to where the boulder was we could hear a voice calling for help. Climbing a steep bank towards the voice, we could just see the outline of a derailed locomotive on its side, which was still slipping down the bank towards the road about 40 metres below. After reaching track level, we found two railway employees injured, and from their information two others still trapped in the cab of the overturned and teetering locomotive. I climbed onto the loco and got into the cab through the drivers window which was practically horizontal. The cab turned out to be full of shingle scooped up by the left hand front door and the occupants already deceased. We then spent several hours helping emergency services to secure the locomotive to the bank. State Highway 1, north of Pukerua Bay was shut down for several days whilst several large cranes were brought in to remove the locomotive from its precarious position.
A court of enquiry was convened several months later in which I was involved, both as the first on the scene and an expert witness. The court was unable to get clarity as to the circumstances of the accident due to lack of detail. As an engineer working on electronics devices for use within the railway, I believed a "black-box" type of product needed to be fitted to locomotives which would document exactly what happened in the event of a catastrophe, and at the same time elevate the status of drivers to that of airline pilots due to the tremendous responsibilities that they shouldered daily. I carried out a subsequent world survey of locomotive data loggers that revealed that almost all were magnetic tape based, a technology that required a large amount of labour and effort to use, and were highly unreliable post-accident.
By 1977 low power microprocessors were just becoming available for general application. I privately purchased an RCA 1802 microprocessor development system and worked after-hours on a product that was eventually to be called Locolog. This was the goal that I set myself in 1978:
"To improve the safety and working environment of locomotive crews and efficiency of railway operations by designing, developing manufacturing and supporting modern electronic equipment".
This became the mission statement of Otari Electronics Ltd. upon formation in 1981 and it remains so today.
In 1980 I resigned to work full time developing electronics for NZR, with the blessing and support of senior management. Vigilance systems, voltage regulators, water temperature loggers, low water level controllers as well as Locolog were part of the initial product portfolio.
By 1981 Locolog was finally installed on-locomotive and evaluated by NZR In 1982 after the fatal Silver Fern crash, NZR issued a purchase order for 375 units to be installed over the next few years. Because of the significant capital requirements for a fledgling business, I sold the project to PEC (New Zealand's largest industrial electronics manufacturer at the time) and went and worked for them for three years to commercialise the product and complete the NZR contract.
Locolog revolutionised the crash recording business by using unique fireproof construction and solid state memory (around 600 sold world-wide)
See full colour brochure for Locolog
From 1982 to 1985 I sold Locolog to the STA of South Australia, Queensland Railways, and installed units on Canadian Pacific Railway. I also negotiated a world-wide distribution agreement with Hasler AG of Switzerland. (Click here to view an accident report from Queensland Railways using Locolog in 2001)
In 1985 having completed the Locolog contract, I resigned from PEC and resumed Otari's rail product developments, this time with the full-time assistance of Elaine, my wife, as a director of Otari Electronics Ltd. As a result of this, the NIMT Rail Fault Location System was developed, as well as a number of new products like the fluorescent lighting ballast which was the forerunner to Ecolight.
In the early 1990's changes to staff within NZR (now Tranz Rail Ltd) meant that opportunities for Otari were restricted, however by this stage Otari was growing rapidly and had 7 employees and a multi-million dollar turnover due to expansion (started in 1988) into the food and beverage industry in New Zealand. Our company became the key and preferred supplier of electronics based packaging equipment for companies like New Zealand Breweries, DB, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Cadbury, Unilever, Kiwi, New Zealand Dairy Group (Anchor) and many others. This growth continued until 1993 when Elaine and I completed the sale of the operation to Southcorp Packaging, one of Australia's largest companies.
From 1994 to 2002 Otari worked within the IT industry supplying its Servicetrack range of computer room monitoring systems. Some railways work continued with the development of Ecolight. In addition a considerable amount of industrial control equipment was designed and supplied. An example of this equipment is the automated testing system developed for Reyrolle-Pacific, then part of the world's largest manufacturers of circuit breakers for electricity supply networks (click here for letter of praise!).
In 2002, significant changes within Tranz Rail Ltd meant that opportunities existed for new advanced technology based around Otari's advanced data logging and control systems, and IP networking knowledge. The first Otari developed product which combined the depth of on-loco experience derived from Locolog with the computer networking and modern data logging and control techniques embedded within Servicetrack is Tranzlog V4.
From 2003 to 2008 Otari Electronics Ltd has grown rapidly to become New Zealand's leading rail electronics supplier. In addition work has started in marketing Otari's large product range to key international markets.
PC -March 2008