New (to me anyway) video on testing drones for inspection purposes, seems like a nobrainer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8YRG-rSOBA&sns=emP
Article from 2015:
http://fortune.com/2015/05/29/bnsf-drone-program/
Recent article .. from another thread
https://unmanned-aerial.com/rockwell-collins-bnsf-railway-demo-long-distance-bvlos-drone-operations
Limited
If anyone thinks this replaces track geometry, survey and high rail inspection, think again. (CN in Canada has had drone capabilities since 2011 that they still can't use here.)
Some use for drainage, hazmat and vegetation assessment, but you would still have to have better remote sensing tools beyond a straight camera on the remote platform. (Just like GPS, GPR, PTC and GIS all having limitations, so does a drone. The gullible and the button pusher generation won't get it. Case in point, lidar aerial photography - BNSF's dumb engineers were in lust with it [ over the warnings of the in-house surveyors/field engineers] ...they learned the hard way that even though they got their coordinates, they could not design with it because the data was somewhere between un-reliable and just plain crap. One thing HH has accomplished in his dumbsizing of three different Class 1 railroads is the destruction of three separate engineering organizations by dumbsizing and short term fiscal stupidity. The generation gap on those three outfits is getting worse than the rest of the industry and the institutional (& intellectual) knowledge continues to vanish (never passed-on to the few new folks). The future got sacrificed for short term gain and compounded with a myoptic ignorance of what M/W+ Engineering needs to have in favor of operating (mechanical has its struggles too with the "we run trains" at the expense of all else mantra. )
Strategically not stated in the previous post is exactly what BNSF is "inspecting" or looking for. The article is more gee-wiz than factual on both links. I'll take a trained set of eyes on the ground over the toy, thank you. The days of cutting the fat by eliminating bodies on a spreadsheet are pretty much over. (Maybe a few of those accounting and business administration corporate numbers bubbas at the top need gone next?)
In other words, if you do not know the basics of civil engineering, you can cost the company lots of money when you say that you know best and act on your ignorance.
Johnny
I don't necessarily disagree with you but remember similar things were said about hotbox, dragging equipment and shifted load detectors, but can you imagine running a railroad without them today? What it takes is intelligent application of these technologies. One need only look at the international trade press to see the widespread application they are recieving. China has more that 100 acoustic bearing detectors in place for example.
buslist, perhaps you could find some better online videos with practical uses for drones/UAVs. That TTCI puff piece is virtually worthless (except circumstantially) in any real technical sense.
I don't think there has been much actual call for doing civil-engineering work with drones, in part for the reasons MC has given. I have now looked at a couple of presentations on aerial Geiger-mode lidar, which is supposed to get around some of the fast imaging issues, and I'm not yet as impressed as I suspect I was supposed to be.
To me, the first best uses of the technology are, as indicated, 'inspection' -- in particular, the use of air vehicles to walk the train, both sides, after an event like a UDE, and perhaps to carry in required 'repair parts' like knuckles or hoses, to obviate a lot of slow and hazardous human clambering and perhaps missed observation while so doing. Or to scan ahead at grade crossings to determine whether an emergency application instead of full service ... or any sustained braking at all ... is in order. Or to find and 'dissuade' trespassers, or keep them in view should some kind of enforcement be necessary (and no, I don't mean with guns or missiles!)
Yes, I think there are extensive 'intelligent applications' for these aircraft, in a variety of sizes, and I confess it's been fun to see some of the learning curves railroads have experienced in figuring out what they can, and can't, do with them at given prevailing levels of technological development.
Dodge, Judah, Kingman, Strong, Morley, Holbrook, Sumner, Blauveldt, Robinson, Palmer (even though he was a poor example of a civil engineer), Blount, deReymer, McMurtrie, King, Wigglesworth, Mears, Gibbs, Deen, Reed, J Edgar Thompson, Case, Barriger, Perlman, Crane, Stillwell, Stevens, and a host of others would roll over in their graves if they saw some of today's nonsense including PTC, HH, FTA, the Wall Street Trash...
mudchickenDodge, Judah, Kingman, Strong, Morley, Holbrook, Sumner, Blauveldt, Robinson, Palmer (even though he was a poor example of a civil engineer), Blount, deReymer, McMurtrie, King, Wigglesworth, Mears, Gibbs, Deen, Reed, J Edgar Thompson, Case, Barriger, Perlman, Crane, Stillwell, Stevens, and a host of others would roll over in their graves if they saw some of today's nonsense including PTC, HH, FTA, the Wall Street Trash...
Oh, I think no few of them would find it quite familiar -- let's remember the Credit Mobilier business, for example. Didn't Judah in particular get well and truly screwed by "business as usual"? And there were plenty of examples of political interference and expedience dating right back to the original common-carrier provisions, selective legal and local prejudice against 'rich' railroads, and resolution of various right-of-way disputes. Anyone remember the piece of super railroad B&M built around 1912 that was never 'allowed' to be used?
Only the magnitude of the stupidity has been amplified in these latter days -- I am still frankly amazed at the $82 million, in most respects concerning it -- I don't think most of the practical engineers you named weren't exquisitely familiar with their own versions of the same nonsense.
PTC in some respects is an admirable thing -- it's just the 2008 version cobbled together by ignorant twentysomethings, with all its cross-purposes mandates, that is such a disaster.
RMETo me, the first best uses of the technology are, as indicated, 'inspection' -- in particular, the use of air vehicles to walk the train, both sides, after an event like a UDE, and perhaps to carry in required 'repair parts' like knuckles or hoses, to obviate a lot of slow and hazardous human clambering and perhaps missed observation while so doing. Or to scan ahead at grade crossings to determine whether an emergency application instead of full service ... or any sustained braking at all ... is in order. Or to find and 'dissuade' trespassers, or keep them in view should some kind of enforcement be necessary (and no, I don't mean with guns or missiles!)
Would have to be relatively substansial drones to be able to transport railroad repair parts such as knuckles. The competent conductor alread carries an air hose and a number of other repair devices on their inspection for a UDE.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
RME mudchicken Dodge, Judah, Kingman, Strong, Morley, Holbrook, Sumner, Blauveldt, Robinson, Palmer (even though he was a poor example of a civil engineer), Blount, deReymer, McMurtrie, King, Wigglesworth, Mears, Gibbs, Deen, Reed, J Edgar Thompson, Case, Barriger, Perlman, Crane, Stillwell, Stevens, and a host of others would roll over in their graves if they saw some of today's nonsense including PTC, HH, FTA, the Wall Street Trash... Oh, I think no few of them would find it quite familiar -- let's remember the Credit Mobilier business, for example. Didn't Judah in particular get well and truly screwed by "business as usual"? And there were plenty of examples of political interference and expedience dating right back to the original common-carrier provisions, selective legal and local prejudice against 'rich' railroads, and resolution of various right-of-way disputes. Anyone remember the piece of super railroad B&M built around 1912 that was never 'allowed' to be used? Only the magnitude of the stupidity has been amplified in these latter days -- I am still frankly amazed at the $82 million, in most respects concerning it -- I don't think most of the practical engineers you named weren't exquisitely familiar with their own versions of the same nonsense. PTC in some respects is an admirable thing -- it's just the 2008 version cobbled together by ignorant twentysomethings, with all its cross-purposes mandates, that is such a disaster.
mudchicken Dodge, Judah, Kingman, Strong, Morley, Holbrook, Sumner, Blauveldt, Robinson, Palmer (even though he was a poor example of a civil engineer), Blount, deReymer, McMurtrie, King, Wigglesworth, Mears, Gibbs, Deen, Reed, J Edgar Thompson, Case, Barriger, Perlman, Crane, Stillwell, Stevens, and a host of others would roll over in their graves if they saw some of today's nonsense including PTC, HH, FTA, the Wall Street Trash...
i suppose those guys would have opposed con cast vacuum degassed rail, concrete ties, elastic fasteners, subgrade stabilization, dieselization, track circuits, radio, etc....
Remember the concept of PTC was conceived by CN in the early 80's and they and the industry spent millions trying to develop it. BN picked up the effort later, the BN guy moved on to the FRA and made all sorts of claims. (The industry was totally stupid for not adopting his approach, and he's far from a twenty something). The cross purpose mandates come from the politicos not the railroaders.
Buslisti suppose those guys would have opposed con cast vacuum degassed rail, concrete ties, elastic fasteners, subgrade stabilization, dieselization, track circuits, radio, etc....
Who guys? There were plenty of forward-looking attempts at those sorts of things early on (one good example being the English attempts at rolling-element bearings in the 1840s, another being the first attempts to use autogenous electric welding around the time of WWI).
It might be mentioned, however, that for every vacuum-degassed rail there is an improperly head-hardened rail that cracks in the gauge corner; for every concrete tie that works are any number of designs that failed, some spectacularly as on CTA; all I need to say about elastic fasteners is 'Pandrol screw fixation"; for subgrade stabilization how about some nice asphalt aggregate; for dieselization the Baldwin quality-control approach; for track circuits ... too many weird problems to name; for radio, even now DPU LOS issues...
In other words, not just innovative technology and approaches, but workable versions of the things -- in a railroad context. I have not been uniformly good at predicting which things will be revolutionary and which will be overripe tomatoes, and so I find it hard to judge people who are either too quick as early adopters or too conservative in the face of apparent opportunity.
What I meant by the twentysomethings and PTC was exactly the point you're making: Government staffers saw a gorgeous opportunity to ram through effective automatic train control a la the Esch Act and the 1947 order ... but didn't stop with safe train-handling control: they just had to include stuff like full civil enforcement, as if everything they wanted to add were part of one big happy homogeneous 'safety' system. It is bundling the whole laundry list into one 'system' and then mandating it as if it were one coherent technical 'thing' that was the disaster, and yes, I think it came from the politicos, or more precisely from the line and staff minions supporting them.
Buslist clearly has no idea why ASCE does not hold sway on railroad engineering in North America (and why AREA/AREMA exists)....
Hint: the academics got told to take a flying leap off a very tall mountain circa 1905 by those in the industry with a practical bent and a scientific mind. The blunders created by ASCE (the biggest being rail design) from 1890 to 1910 caused the Talbot Reports and other standard issue railroad technical expertise to the forefront. AREA/AREMA and the signal predecessors to AREMA never went all-in on anything without rigorous testing and trial test sections. Don't tell anybody that the politicians and non-railroaders inside USDOT did not heed that protocol. ASCE dabbles inside transit (read bus people trying to railroad), but light rail and railroading in a hole in the ground gets you mixed results (like WMATA) in a largely unregulated environment where it's OK to guess and stumble around on the public dime.
mudchickenHint: the academics got told to take a flying leap off a very tall mountain circa 1905 by those in the industry with a practical bent and a scientific mind. The blunders created by ASCE (the biggest being rail design) from 1890 to 1910 caused the Talbot Reports and other standard issue railroad technical expertise to the forefront. AREA/AREMA and the signal predecessors to AREMA never went all-in on anything without rigorous testing and trial test sections.
Was this also true of the people who 'developed' the wack balancing formula initially applied to the ACL R-class 4-8-4s?
Everyone thinks technology is the answer to the problems facing us when good old education of kids would go a heck of a long way to solving most of them. I have lost track of the number of times in the media I follow I have seen stories of drivers that could not do simple math like the weight limit of a bridge and how they exceeded it, or how most people these days can not even do these things like read a map make change fix a broken light cord it is sad. The collaspe of education in this nation as a whole is depressing and the march towards using technology is scary. The current example is in my industry to mandate so called Elogs heck almost 90% of all drivers are already on them. Why because that is all the mega carriers run. Why because their own drivers could not fill out a logbook if they had to anymore they can't grasp the idea of what line they need to be on and when.
Some times " common sense" will override technology. Whatever the case may be that is in question, there seems to be a decline in common sense. Technology is supposed to be for the good, whose good? Here in Arizona drones are registered and some folks think it's just for the other guy. Drone flying over a hazard - ie. airport runway or a forest fire. This week with all the forest fires , two nice folk caused fire aircraft to stand down. One man was caught--- jail time and big fine , the seconed person will be caught after flying in closed area---forest fire.There has been quiet talk on shooting down drones that are in a hazard zone. Common sense seems to be just two words any more.
Y6bs evergreen in my mind
Common sense is a uncommon commodity!
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