In the meantime, it’s up to engineers to maintain the speed within limits. They’ve done it for over 70 years, more than a dozen times a day. The bend is only a few miles from Philadelphia station where it stopped. It’s not like you’ve gone miles at high speed and came to a bend. It’s possible there was something wrong with the engine or that the engineer meant to slow down but ended up speeding?
It’s frustrating to hear different news about the PTC from two Amtrak managers.
What are they? I have a feeling people make too big a deal about PTC. If they are installed along the track, how reliable is the maintenance going to be? Track mantenance people can’t maintain PTC. It will have to be higher paid technicians going around hundreds of miles of tracks. They pay engineers to drive a train and technicians to maintain PTC to keep the speed limit? Why don’t they invest on self-driving trains instead? It can’t be that hard if we are about to get a self-driving car. I think PTC is already outdated. I think what Amtrek needs is brains not more funding.
One says PTC is not installed yet. One says it’s installed but not activated yet because the FCC has not approved the high frequency.
Business does not upgrade to new technology not because new technology is not available. It’s because of the ROI.
I hate to fly on the old airplanes on the commuting routes but the airlines don’t want to replace them. We have the slow internet speed because the communication companies want the squize the profits from the existing investments first. China, Korea,… have better trains because they don’t have to get rid of the old ones.
^And because they have governments with centralized decision making and government owned enterprises. Fewer parties to weigh in on where investments should be made.
^ That too. Agree.
Thinking about it some more, why do they need to install anything along the track? Don’t they have GPS? They already know what speed limits are at each location. GPS can detect where the train is and what the speed needs to be. PTS sounds like a dinosaur.
What good is having GPS data if you can’t do anything about it? PTS will automatically slow down a train as it approaches a speed limited section of the route.
S1, whose been on that route alot, wasn’t even aware of that curve, which says to me that most engineers slow down for that curve well before it. I’d feel alot better though with installation of whatever technology would make the decision-making automatic.
Of course, you will have to install some kind of cruise control on the engine. You’d need it anyway. Using GPS, you’d eliminate the outside installation along the track or the need for a radio frequency or extensive maintennance.
GPS is a receive only signal. For train to report its position it would need to report its position via a two way communication link (cell phone or satcom transponder). Perhaps the engineers designing the safety system considered that method but concluded it was not a reliable method of communicating its command and control system (they have no control over the operation of the comms link and they are susceptible to jamming and spoofing). A localized system of track sensors is a more robust system and can have multiple redundant safety mechanisms.
Japanese bullet train system just celebrated 50 years. In that period, zero fatalities and an on-time performance where the average tardiness is measured in seconds. Spotlessly clean, too.
@alwaysamom, I’m so sorry for your friend’s loss.
In theory they could control the trains from a central command point, with GPS you can track the train, know how fast it is going and relay back to the train instructions to slow down or speed up and so forth. If I remember correctly, the high speed trains in China and elsewhere are run that way, the engineers are there only in the case of emergencies and other contingencies.
External speed control is not new technology, in the NYC subway they have speed detection on curves, and if a train is going too fast it activates the so called trippers, that dump the air from the braking system and forces a stop.
The reason to have something like TPS is redundancy, whether the engineer is running the train or if we had remote activation, you want to have several levels of safety. Relying on an engineer alone, or even an automated system alone, doesn’t allow for all the contingencies. Planes have several levels of redundancy as a matter of course, have for many years, and it makes sense to have that on trains in heavily travelled quarters.
Another reason you need the controls along the rails is that critical parts of the NE corridor route are underground where there are no cell or GPS signals (unless they install a WAAS system), such as the entrance to the tunnel into Manhattan from NJ, and the entire underground track system in Manhattan from the Hudson River all the way until the train exits the other end in Queens to the railyard.
China’s high speed rail lines were built separately from its ‘regular’ rail network. The old lines still operate as it did before serving the great mass of people who can’t afford the high speed rail tickets. The French TGVs were built on specially designed and dedicated tracks for those trains. The existing rail network continued to operate as usual with its own upgrades.
alwaysamom, I’m so sorry for your friend’s loss…
Do you think about the maintenance of PTC? We will see if this accident was a human error or the engine malfunction. If it’s a human error, an automated system can help. If it’s the engine malfunction and maintenance issue, how do we know PTC will be better maintained and will kick in when we need it? Is having an engineer and PTC better redundancy than an engineer and an automated system?
Isn’t PTC an automated system?