train wreck

An alert that says, "Hey, it's been 10 minutes since I bugged you"? They've got a deadman control that if you let go for more than a few seconds the alarm goes off. What's wrong with expecting the driver to drive?

So it's better to not have warning?

It's in there.

There is no such thing.

SO it's better to know nothing than have ("just") a warning?

The point is that the technology has been around for a decade. For cheap! Only the federal government could screw up a system when all the pieces have been in the private sector for a decade. We're not talking about anything near the complexity of ATC, either.

That's pretty cool.

To do what? If it sees something ahead and tries to stop the train, it comes to a stop a mile after hitting it.

I've seen a car GPS say a road is perfectly good to drive on when it was a walking path. There's a photo on the web somewhere of an 18 wheeler stopped on a narrow dirt road just ahead of a foot bridge over a large gorge. Supposedly he was following the GPS. Looked pretty hard to back out of.

My work PC does the same. It seems that IT is busy doing something lately because it needs to shut down every few days for some upgrade or another. I generally leave it go months without shutting down (takes hours to get everything back to where it was).

They own the network and get to chose what's on it.

I guess it would be a problem if the engineer decided to turn the train onto a walking path (good grief!).

I'd expect that an iPhone is far more reliable, hardware and software, than the great majority of hundred-magabuck, has-been-ready-to-deploy-for-decades custom-contracted Amtrack systems.

Airline pilots are now using iPads as "electronic flight bags."

Yeah, cross-country dirt-road trains are getting way too popular.

Too busy text messaging.

If the only possible false warning is "SLOW DOWN", so be it. It's recoverable.

Why would he miss the "actual slowing point" (whatever that is)?

So it would be better to not warn him and crash. Neat.

Nonsense. We're talking about suspenders that are only there in case the belt breaks (or brakes).

Inertial navigation is in there.

It's a matter of degree. I'm not talking about eliminating the engineer, just a better mousetrap.

I said nothing about that, though I don't see an issue with it feeding the deadman system where it can only stop the train if the engineer doesn't respond.

Nonsense. Stopping is always better than not knowing.

So we're back to, "if the government can't do anything right, then they shouldn't".

Nice!

To sense speed, not obstacles. They're talking about using a consumer GPS. A consumer RADAR would be more reliable. My phone GPS is off by a hundred meters frequently. I'm on one road and it thinks I'm on a parallel road. I'm sure there are sections of track that have a different speed limit than nearby track. The local speed limit could be signaled by the switches while passing by them. That could even be done by a cheap passive device, which is what a sign is.

I didn't know we switched the topic to track signaling.

Everything is electronic these days.

Sure but we were specifically talking about speed warnings to the engineer, not taking positive control over the entire operation with an iPhone.