Dr Zarkoff Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> >had he been going 25mph the posted track speed he
> might have blew by the siganl but he would've had
> enough time to stop before kissing pilots ..
>
> Dear alledged "expert". You quite oviously don't
> know the territory nor where #14 was stopped. Had
> this guy "blown by the signal" ("blown" is the
> proper tense for your sentence, BTW), and your
> new-fangled gadgets stopped him, he still would
> have hit the other train, at approximately the
> same speed. And that's the point OPB and I are
> trying to make. You must be a salesman, that or
> Chicken Little.

I'm no expert on PTC, but if the system that'll eventually be installed in the Oakland area is the same or similar to the system that UP is currently testing out of City of Industry, it'll be a proactive and preventative system that will use an onboard computer to receive GPS locations and uploaded train information (such as horsepower and tonnage) to determine how the train should be operated, and will initiate a brake application if it determines that the engineer is taking no action, or not the appropriate action.

In this instance, if the computer had determined that the appropriate action was not being taken by the engineer to stop the train short of the red signal at NI007, it would've done so itself, prior to the train passing the signal.