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Re: PTC not solely dependent upon GPS?
Author: Dr Zarkoff
Date: 12-20-2009 - 13:38
>Years of decapitatlization have created a corporate culture of doing little except making do with antiquated systems.
Spoken like a sales man.
>I was in engine service and an operating officer way back when, and the idea that railroads would allow on duty employees to use cell phones for personal use is a non-compute...to me it would be a firing offense.
Then how did you pass all your Rules tests? The Rules have prohibited their use for /years/, if not decades, long before Chatsworth.
>In civilian [GPS] implementations, there are no acceptable losses.
GPS can't detect broken rails. The FRA won't approve any system which can't detect broken rails.
>GPS, whether for train control or any civilian application, is cool, "cutting-edge" technology. You tell someone something is GPS based, the automatic assumption is it is somehow better because it uses GPS, when really, it may not be.
Thank you for saying this; there's all too much advertising hype surrounding PTC.
>But in computers that level of complexity is manageable and not a problem.
Tell this to the crew of that coal train on Soldier Summit who died when their EAB brakes failed to operate properly. Also tell it to the poor kid in Bloomington WVA who got crushed c2000 by a runaway CSX coal train which suffered a similar EAB problem.
The problem with computers is that the memory regions have become so small that stray background radiation (gamma rays, cosmic rays, even the alpha particles emitted by everything around us) can alter a bit here and there, sufficient to cause glitches and errors in data and/or a program's execution. This first appeared in an article in Scientific American about 20 years ago.
The issues which are trying to be "resolved" by all this clamoring for PTC and what not are caused by the HR departments and their diversity policies. They've lowered the professional skills and attitudes of the operating employees by making it very difficult to get rid of the bad eggs in a timely fashion.
Spoken like a sales man.
>I was in engine service and an operating officer way back when, and the idea that railroads would allow on duty employees to use cell phones for personal use is a non-compute...to me it would be a firing offense.
Then how did you pass all your Rules tests? The Rules have prohibited their use for /years/, if not decades, long before Chatsworth.
>In civilian [GPS] implementations, there are no acceptable losses.
GPS can't detect broken rails. The FRA won't approve any system which can't detect broken rails.
>GPS, whether for train control or any civilian application, is cool, "cutting-edge" technology. You tell someone something is GPS based, the automatic assumption is it is somehow better because it uses GPS, when really, it may not be.
Thank you for saying this; there's all too much advertising hype surrounding PTC.
>But in computers that level of complexity is manageable and not a problem.
Tell this to the crew of that coal train on Soldier Summit who died when their EAB brakes failed to operate properly. Also tell it to the poor kid in Bloomington WVA who got crushed c2000 by a runaway CSX coal train which suffered a similar EAB problem.
The problem with computers is that the memory regions have become so small that stray background radiation (gamma rays, cosmic rays, even the alpha particles emitted by everything around us) can alter a bit here and there, sufficient to cause glitches and errors in data and/or a program's execution. This first appeared in an article in Scientific American about 20 years ago.
The issues which are trying to be "resolved" by all this clamoring for PTC and what not are caused by the HR departments and their diversity policies. They've lowered the professional skills and attitudes of the operating employees by making it very difficult to get rid of the bad eggs in a timely fashion.
