BRYAN Parker gets to control one of the biggest train sets in Britain as part of the team in the Carlisle Power Signal Box.

The safety of trains and their passengers from the Scottish borders, through Cumbria and into Lancashire is the daily task of the controllers.

How it all works was described by Mr Parker in a talk at the spring meeting of the Cumbrian Railways Association.

Members and guests at the Carus Green Gold Club, near Kendal, heard that Mr Parker had worked at the Power Signal Box, near Carlisle's Citadel Station since 1985.

The box was built in 1973 and all the track sections it controls, with their signals, points and gauges, are represented by plastic illuminating panels around the sixe of a credit card.

They can be taken out and put into the correct place like a giant - and very long - jigsaw puzzle showing a significant slice of railway activity in the North of England.

There are even infra red scanners which can be used to detect the heat from passing trains to help controllers know that everything is in the right place on the network.

The bulk of the daily service on the electified lines through Cumbria are for passengers but the power box also controls the movement of freight trains.

Near Shap there are lines serving three limestone quarries which provide railway ballast, ston for the making of lime for agricultural fields and for use in industrial furnaces.

The amount of traffic using the electric-power network on the West Coast Main Line has increased in recent decades.

At its peak, there is three electric trains per hour in each direction through the county. In the 1960s it was three a day.

The situation is rather different on the Cumbria Coast Line where manual signal boxes pass responsibility for individual trains from one box to the next.

Signal box staff hand out what are called "tokens" on sections of single line operation - such as St Bees - to make sure two trains can't meet each other head-on.