I became a telecommunication engineer at Swedish State Railways "SJ" in Helsingborg autumn 1983.

As telecommunication engineer at SJ the work vary a lot. One minute it could be a phone that didn't work, or a clock in an office, platform or in a waiting room who didn't show the right time. The next task could be a computer that have stopped working, often because of a loose cable or a cable that have been broken. Radiocommunication in all of its varying forms and models can be troublesome then they are most needed, and the users are frustrated then they can't communicate with each other. Shunting in a yard need a well working radiocommunication. SJ have their own cables in the roadbed and at the yard, there the internal telephony and datacommunication crossed the tracks forwards and backwards. A frequent task was to repair the tele cables. It could be moisture inside the cable, or damaged by a power shovel operated by a wild operator. It was often commented with " that old cable didn't we think was in use", because it was rusty.

Moving tele subscribers was a frequent task then a person got a new office. There was a lot of different ways of connecting offices in the railways. From the beginning the telephone exchange was electromechanical with thousands of relays that always needed maintenance to work faultless. In the middle of the eighties the old exchanges was replaced one by one with digital exchanges. SJ bought Erikssons MD 110, who is just like Telias AXE. The different is that AXE can manage more subscribers, but the facilities is about the same.

In the middle of the eighties SJ started to build their own optocable network for the telephony and data communications. The quality was increased drastically with the optocable and digital connections. Earlier it was not so good quality, especially long distans calls.

^{Teacher at Railway Training Centre "Banskolan"}

In autumn 1987 I became a teacher at Swedish State Training Centre in Engelholm. They trained repairpersonnel from the whole country. Engine drivers was trained in Mjölby, and administrators in Stockholm.

The government decided that the infrastructure should be separated from SJ, and the Swedish National Rail Administration was born in 1988. The Swedish State Training Centre in Engelholm was also separated in two parts. Swedish State Training Centre manage the training in repairing diesel engines and carriages, and the Railway Training Centre who is responsible for the training in Permanent way, Electrical, Signaling, Telecommunications and basic training. We who worked in these departments was automatically employed by the Swedish National Rail Administration.

I started to teach in digitaltechnic, and took after a while the responsibility for connection technique with soft soldering. The digital technique is everything between number system, gates and flip flops to more complex circuits. All this to get ready for the fault who can appear in the complex systems in the railway equipment.