>The advances in digital short range communications technologies

have nothing to do with what I'm talking about. It's one thing to equip and maintain all the locomotives, a large enough job in and of itself. It's quite another to equip and maintain all the freight cars, which is the point: the scale of the undertaking makes it too costly to do so given how well the standard air brakes already do the job. The problem now is addle-pated management with it's fixation with never using the system which has been in place since 1880.

>Yes, you'll say this technology has already had its own set of problems with the potential for accelerators in cars losing communication, from potentially hacking into the digital signal and thus the device, or from basic screw ups like coding errors in these complex programs.

The more complex a system is, the more prone it is to failures.