Honestly, I'm only half amazed. Average lifespan of railroad infrastructure is 50 yrs., optimum lifespan can be well over 100 yrs. We're not talking about mobile phones that have to be replaced every 2-3 yrs. because they became obsolete here. There's a reason, why there's a whole industry around keeping legacy hardware alive.

transportgeography.org/content…

The lifespan of Main Transport Assets | The Geography of Transport Systems

^{Jean-Paul Rodrigue (The Geography of Transport Systems)}

OK. What are they going to do when ...

. One of those floppies refuses to load with a disc error ?
. Do they have backup copies ?
. What if their server goes down, any replacement available ?
. How are they going to acquire replacement floppies ? Don't think you can buy them except maybe on ebay as 'antiques'.
. Any moves to modernise ?

Or do they wait till the day the entire MTA is stopped ?

Nice SciFi disaster film idea : The day the MTA stopped.

#Resilience

I knew it!

Never touch a running system! 😉

My last few jobs have shown just how hard it is to write replacements for actively used systems. Public or private, there are resource costs, and more demand for resources than there are resources available. Always. Even in some Star Trek utopia, the time and focus of skilled humans is still scarce.

To re-develop a complex system, you need a team to redesign, and a team to keep the old system running. The time for the resdesign means it WILL be out of date by the time it's done. Furthermore, the "maintenance" team will be adding features/changing rules, so the replacement design is a moving target, constantly needing to be changed before it's done.

It's not impossible. It IS done regularly. To do it, you need resource-allocators to commit a LOT of resources, with the attendant opportunity costs: What ELSE could we do w/those resources instead of rewriting something that "works well enough"? (Until it *doesn't* work anymore. Then the finger pointing begins.)