Joel N. Weber II
Engineer
If the freight railroads had PTC that really worked completely correctly, would the management of the freight railroads see any reason to continue to pay crews to travel with freight trains?
It probably provides most of what's needed for forward motion only. But even then it can't detect stuff on the track, including people, it can't do switching, it definately can't do uncoupling, and probably a few other things. And then you've got to fight the public perception of it being unsafe by not having anyone in the cab. At best, I'd say that perhaps 15 to 20 years down the road you might find that we're doing single person cabs, but I'm betting that you'll never get to the unstaffed level.But doesn't PTC have the potential to provide enough information to the trains that the trains could drive themselves?
And just how well can a human Acela Express engineer on a train going 150 MPH detect people on the track? I seem to recall a maintenance person was killed in Rhode Island not so long ago. Maybe that's not a fair comparison, as I suspect stopping distance is proportional to the square of speed, which means an 80 MPH freight train might have some chance of stoping in 1/4 the distance; on the other hand, the axle loading on the freight train is probably a lot heavier, which may more than make up for that.But even then it can't detect stuff on the track, including people, it can't do switching, it definately can't do uncoupling, and probably a few other things. And then you've got to fight the public perception of it being unsafe by not having anyone in the cab. At best, I'd say that perhaps 15 to 20 years down the road you might find that we're doing single person cabs, but I'm betting that you'll never get to the unstaffed level.
NoBART runs unstaffed, right?
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