The Wreck of Amtrak 188

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/magazine/the-wreck-of-amtrak-188.html

by dankohn1 • 10 years ago

11 6 10 years ago

samcheng• 10 years ago

With all this talk about self-driving cars, it's really depressing (and tragic!) to see so little progress on self-driving trains (Positive Train Control).

Think about how much easier self-driving trains are to implement! There's already no expectation that a train can swerve to avoid the unexpected obstacle, there's already digital switching to make sure the train goes in the right direction and instruct the engineer to stop, and the retrofit problem is much easier, since all locomotives are part of a fleet (as opposed to privately-owned cars).

ild2• 10 years ago

The problem with PTC, that the railroad companies are totally incompetent in making this, demanding, knowledge intensive kind of software. I know people charged with this at a large railways corp and they are terribly underqualified.

stuaxo• 10 years ago

You'd think they could bring in experts from other countries that have implemented this already.

ptha• 10 years ago

From the article, it appears adoption of PTC has been hampered by Amtrak developing it's own system, funding issues and slow approval from the FCC:

"In much of Asia and Europe, engineers are protected by a technology known in the United States as positive train control, or P.T.C. Connected by digital radio waves or GPS signals, P.T.C. transponders in the track maintain constant contact with computers in the cabs of oncoming trains. If the transponders determine a train is traveling too fast, the locomotive’s brakes are triggered automatically. Amtrak has been working on its own in-house version of P.T.C., called the Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System, or Acses, for almost a decade. But owing to insufficient funding and a row with the F.C.C., which Amtrak said had been slow to approve the use of the requisite radio bandwidth, its actual implementation has been piecemeal."

Later on in the article it confirms that PTC has been rolled out on the line where the accident occurred, but a national rollout out will potentially take until 2020:

"In late May, Joseph Boardman, Amtrak’s C.E.O. and president, promised that the installation of P.T.C. on the Northeast Corridor would be completed by the end of 2015, a pledge he has kept: Today, the system is active on all routes, with the exception of substantial stretches of track owned by the State of Connecticut. (A spokesman for the Connecticut Department of Transportation said it hoped to have P.T.C. installed on all state-owned track by 2018.) It will be some time before a national rollout is complete. In November, President Obama signed into law an extension to the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008, giving railroad companies — which had complained about the cost of implementation — until 2020 to bring the technology online."

LeifCarrotson• 10 years ago

Even today, it’s not hard to reach the tracks if you want to; plenty of holes and gaps remain. A sergeant with the Philadelphia Police Department told me that the rail bed is popular with addicts and dealers. “And let me tell you,” he said, “you couldn’t build a fence high enough to keep them all out.”

As with software piracy, the solution is not to make the tracks unreachable - that's impossible. Instead, make them less desirable than the alternative.

For people trespassing to walk on the tracks to get somewhere, add good sidewalks or park paths. For people crossing between one building and another, add official pedestrian crossings and signals, or build bridges and tunnels that are nicer to walk than trying to hop even a 4', no-barbed-wire fence.

For addicts and dealers, make non-dangerous drugs legal. I am not sure what to do about dangerous drugs and other crime that needs a secret place to meet, but I think access would make this much easier.

People walk a rail near me because it's literally the safest way to get from the town (restaurants, the park, ice cream, shops, the river a little off-screen to the southeast) to the high school and the Stoney Creek neighborhood to the North:

http://i.imgur.com/0pBaSa4.jpg

Division is not walkable. Lamareaux is mostly, but the sidewalk crosses back and forth, traffic is fast, and the railroad is much more direct.

The Wreck of Amtrak 188

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