At the heart of Vancouver’s Expo and Millennium SkyTrain Lines is an aging Pentium computer with 1992 software contained on floppy discs.

TransLink relies on these backup floppies to provide the last stream of data when there is a major glitch with the system, like a pair of massive shutdowns last month that led stranded passengers to force open the doors on SkyTrain cars and escape along the tracks. SkyTrain is an automated system without drivers, although the trains can be operated manually in an emergency.

“We’ve never had any real serious hiccups (before that),” said Sun Fang, vice-president of maintenance for B.C. Rapid Transit Co., which is responsible for SkyTrain. “July 21 was the first time in 28 years that the entire system came down.”

Fang, who has been dubbed the “Godfather of SkyTrain” because he has been with the company since its beginning, offered insights Tuesday during a tour of SkyTrain infrastructure, aimed at giving the public a better understanding of the people behind the complex system.

The tour started in the control room — the “brain” of the operation — where seven operators control everything from moving and reducing trains during peak and non-peak hours, to closing SkyTrain doors to responding to calls for missing children or possessions.

That was followed with a viewing of Fang’s Pentium computer, which is considered the heart of the operation because it communicates with the SkyTrain vehicles. “If it doesn’t talk to the train, the train will die,” said Fang.

This happened twice last month — on Thursday, July 17, when the system was shutdown for three hours because of a computer card glitch, and four days later, on July 21, when the Expo and Millennium Lines were out for five hours as a result of human error.

In the first instance, it took maintenance workers an hour and a half to figure out what had gone wrong, Fang said, because they initially looked for the problem in the control panel and didn’t notice a faulty computer card.

“This is the one that caused us the grief. People upstairs were trying to restart (the system) and it kept failing,” he said. “It didn’t make sense because we didn’t see it before. Now we’re a lot smarter.”

Fred Cummings, CEO of B.C. Rapid Transit Co., said the two shutdowns were a “very bad coincidence that were unrelated. The odds of that happening were enormous, but it did happen.

“It’s a very complex system with a lot of moving parts,” he said. “It’s not a faceless company. I’d like the public to understand there are people working behind the system. Everyone jumped and they tried to fix things immediately.”

Cummings said he has no idea when B.C. Rapid Transit Co. will be able to rebuild public confidence in the system, but he pointed out that more than 700,000 people used the SkyTrain during the B.C. Day long weekend.

“If we continue like we have in the next couple of weeks, we’ll build back that confidence soon,” he said.