OT: Muppets

Government? You bet!

Remember when Amtrak tried to get into the freight hauling business for a while?

Trains like these were a common sight in the Northeast in the 1990s, couple coaches and about 10 intermodal freight and boxcars:

No, on what was reported in the news. The train was rolling at well above 2x the legal speed limit without any positive trail control enabled. That does constitute a serious design error in my book. Design includes the enabling or disabling of features that should have been available.

See below. I never said it is 100% fail-safe. No system ever is but it is much safer versus what we have in the US (or rather, don't have ...)

It normally won't even let a train onto the track in opposite direction anywhere close to another. It'll stop it.

To some extent, yes. However, not when witnessed personally. Most people cannot forget a gruesome accident scene even if it was decades ago. I still remember one from my childhood days, in detail.

My philosophy is that if we can do better in some area then we ought to.

No idea. The German system works inductively and non-contact is usually the best method when you have to deal with contaminants such as oily sludge, snow, water and so on. Vandalism or dangerous pranks are another issue. Thing is, you also have to curb the number of false alarms because any delay has painful consequences.

It would make sense. I remember the passenger trains from my younger days in Germany. They usually had at least one freight car, sometimes more. Not only did this allow you to "check in" large baggage, it also made for a fast shipment option. Once we had an issue with a custom power supply made near Munich. Problem was, we were about 350mi or so north and time was of the essence. So I looked at the train schedules, drove it to the next station, gave it to the guy that loaded an Intercity train and about 5h later it was in Munich where an engineer from the supplier also drove to the station to pick it up. We had their measurement results and a mod suggestion the same day. That wouldn't even have been possible with Fedex, and this was in the 80's.

Some people have been recommending GPS, which has its own set or pros and cons. Multipath, jamming, doesn't work in tunnels without repeaters:

On the other hand, it is cheap, easily installed, and can transmit location back to central control.

It looks like Amtrack is already starting to use GPS to track train location:

If this is true, it wouldn't take much to have it reduce speed in slow sections. Cheap GPS receivers could be replaced with airline navigation receivers which monitor the GPS signal and issue an alert if it becomes unreliable.

PTC on a shoestring.

You can do the equivalent with airplanes: have people go to airports on both ends. But it travels 600 MPH, not 60.

The USA is big. Surface shipping coast to coast will take days.

I can order from Digikey at 5PM and have parts on my desk by the time I show up the next morning. That's amazing.

Ok, I should have known. You didn't read what I've posted and are not talking about the same accident.

You still didn't answer the question about what is *DIFFERENT* between the two systems. You are going on about how much better the German system is without saying what is different!!!

You aren't reading the conversation. The question is how does it stop a train traveling in the opposite direction if it doesn't know the stopped train is there?

Fortunately, and unfortunately, very few people get to see any serious accidents. So they think accidents won't happen to them.

Yes, I think that applies to nearly everything we do. We can always do better, but not if we take the attitude that we are doing good enough.

The part of the North Anna nuclear reactor event that impacted me the most was to realize that the power plant had single points of failure in critical safety systems. The one that caused a generator failure was a defective procedure in installing a head gasket. We were very lucky that the generators ran as well as they did. Since the procedure impacts *all* the generators it could have caused them all to fail.

GPS can navigate a car block-by-block in any city in the USA, so surely it could track train speed and location.

A lot of train crashes happen when the driver doesn't slow down for curves.

What good does that do? Your reported location will be that of the antenna!

But not completely reliable. GPS has issues where you don't have a clear view of a large area of the sky such as in mountainous or urban environments.

This is a passenger convenience system! It doesn't address any of the safety issues involved in using GPS to control the speed of a train.

What do you do with an alert?

Yes, that's what people want, a PTC system that works *most* of the time.

GPS isn't reliable. I've seen my GPS report location some significant distance from my true location because of the surrounding terrain.

John Larkin wrote on 12/20/2017 12:17 PM:

The amazing part is that Digikey can inventory, pick and ship so many items to so many customers in such a short time. Their warehouse must be an amazing example of automation.

Notice how slow the train is going. It's actually the passenger service the railroads would like to ditch. Rails are never going to be high speed except at great expense and in very limited, dense markets. The US has vast stretches of open space and high mountains. Trains are a slow way to navigate that.

Passenger service seems to work ok in much of the north east US which is densely populated. Even there it is hard to turn a profit which is what it's all about.

Den onsdag den 20. december 2017 kl. 19.19.23 UTC+1 skrev rickman:

unless you lay down tracks as you go, the possible locations for a train is quite limited ...

Arguably it is also about enabling/facilitating all the other city-based activities that need to turn a profit. None of the other activities could individually justify the costs, and the tragedy of the commons applies.

It's like having an 'occupied' flag on a restroom. You know the location, 'in the tunnel', well enough not to ram another train into it.

The private railroads companies did ditch passenger service circa 1970, hence Amtrak.

Amtrak is currently one of those public-private partnership deals; it's currently operating at a loss of "only" ~200 million/yr on revenues of 3 billion, quite a bit better than some other transit industry companies that come to mind.

It wouldn't be any great feat to run Amtrak in 2017 as publicly or privately held corporation. It's not at all hard to turn a profit in the Northeast and California and the numbers bear that out. But it would require ejecting the money-losing routes thru the Midwest and South.

Must be a tough call for Real America between the ire at "socialist rail" and the fact that the only financially feasible way to make it non-"socialist rail" would be to eject them from the schedule and make it Blue State Rail.

I don't see it happening anytime soon, Real America loves to complain about "handouts" but is never one to turn them down when offered.

"You can't turn a profit on long-distance train service!" except that Chicago -> San Francisco and New York -> Orlando are two of Amtrak's most sold-out routes.

Amtrak has one train you can get your car packed up on, you'd think one way to increase long-distance profitability would be to run auto racks on the major cross-country routes to let you take your vehicle along with.