Question: freight on Surfliner territory
Author: mook
Date: 03-06-2012 - 15:25
For freights in the Surfliner 90 mph (still good old ATS?) territory: do freight locomotives have to have ATS too or does the dispatcher do all the work? If they do need ATS, how does BNSF handle that since little of their railroad elsewhere in CA allows more than 79 for passengers (a few bits of Needles perhaps)? I would presume they don't have ATS on everything -- too costly and maintenance intensive -- but that might be a problem making sure the right leading locos get assigned to San Diego trains. And I think I saw something here a while back saying that BNSF was gradually deactivating ATS elsewhere on the Transcon (slowing Amtrak to 79) because the maintenance was too much for 2 trains a day which if true would make it less likely that freight equipment with ATS would be available in the long term. Curious....