PTC and freight train crews

[Joel N. Weber II]

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?

 

[AlanB]

Sure, PTC doesn't drive the trains. It only makes sure that the crew obeys the signals.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

But doesn't PTC have the potential to provide enough information to the trains that the trains could drive themselves?

 

[AlanB]

But doesn't PTC have the potential to provide enough information to the trains that the trains could drive themselves?

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.

 

[Joel N. Weber II]

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.

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.

While there may be some safety problems that can be detected by a human in the cab, there is also the argument that not having a human in the cab will save a life in the event that that cab collides with something. And if the railroads hope to save massive amounts on wages, they may be willing to spend money on better sensors at grade crossings.

BART runs unstaffed, right?

I can certainly see how trains doing local deliveries of small numbers of cars may still need to be staffed, but I get the impression that once a train has been assembled and is going to be shipped several hundred miles as a single unit without any uncoupling, a PTC system might well be able to take over for the humans. And in a large hump yard, complete automation may well also be possible, even though it probably requires something a bit beyond PTC, and there'd need to be an automated way to get the cars to uncouple (but installing the equipment for this could be done at the same time as converting to eletronically controlled brakes).

 

[George Harris]

BART runs unstaffed, right?

No