It seems to me that on board sensors would be a good idea to identify problems early on. Sensors that continuously monitor and report data to both the crew and to management, augmented by wayside detectors. Crews can't see what's going on 8000 ft behind them unless things have already gone terribly wrong. Maybe further along the sensors can feed a computer that does some quick math to establish maximium safe brake pressure given train length, speed, and location in the network. Until then, let the sensors alert the crew, and let their expertise determine how to safely bring the train to a stop. Locomotives have sensors galore.. that same level of technology needs to be applied to the rolling stock.
UlrichIt seems to me that on board sensors would be a good idea to identify problems early on. Sensors that continuously monitor and report data to both the crew and to management, augmented by wayside detectors. Crews can't see what's going on 8000 ft behind them unless things have already gone terribly wrong. Maybe further along the sensors can feed a computer that does some quick math to establish maximium safe brake pressure given train length, speed, and location in the network. Until then, let the sensors alert the crew, and let their expertise determine how to safely bring the train to a stop. Locomotives have sensors galore.. that same level of technology needs to be applied to the rolling stock.
Who will maintain the sensors? What will be the Inspection cycle for the sensors? 92 day inspection cycle like it is for locomotives? 5 years like it is for Air Brake Valves? Somewhere in between? Will sensor inspection require the equipment be taken out of service for the inspection? What happens when a sensor fails while moving in a train? Contine? Set the car out?
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Is that a knee jerk reaction?
EuclidIs that a knee jerk reaction?
Your knee is vibrating.
Any 'solution' will have some form of cost! Who will participate in paying that cost? A real world question.
Euclid Is that a knee jerk reaction?
Reality.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
Ulrich that same level of technology needs to be applied to the rolling stock. Add Quote to your Post
Ok, lete's do it. Are you going to complain when the price of pretty much everything goes up even more?
Ulrich It seems to me that on board sensors would be a good idea to identify problems early on. Sensors that continuously monitor and report data to both the crew and to management, augmented by wayside detectors. Crews can't see what's going on 8000 ft behind them unless things have already gone terribly wrong. Maybe further along the sensors can feed a computer that does some quick math to establish maximium safe brake pressure given train length, speed, and location in the network. Until then, let the sensors alert the crew, and let their expertise determine how to safely bring the train to a stop. Locomotives have sensors galore.. that same level of technology needs to be applied to the rolling stock.
I wonder what the pros and cons are with these various sensor systems. Here is an article about current sensor technology for freight trains:
What make you so sure the price would go up? Why would anyone buy it if there was no payback. The paybak should save money that would be otherwise spent on picking up train wrecks and paying the damage claims, settling law suits, etc.
One phone call in Chatsworth sure changed a lot of things.
It's an idea, not a PhD thesis, and we're just talking here. Obviously there would be costs involved, and an inspection cycle and maintenance schedule would need to be developed.
CSX Robert Ulrich that same level of technology needs to be applied to the rolling stock. Add Quote to your Post Ok, lete's do it. Are you going to complain when the price of pretty much everything goes up even more?
No, the cost of the sensors would be offset by fewer accidents and addressing wear issues before they become catastrophic. And..complaining isn't really my thing.
Euclid What make you so sure the price would go up? Why would anyone buy it if there was no payback. The paybak should save money that would be otherwise spent on picking up train wrecks and paying the damage claims, settling law suits, etc.
If it would save them money they would've already implemented it.
Euclid Ulrich It seems to me that on board sensors would be a good idea to identify problems early on. Sensors that continuously monitor and report data to both the crew and to management, augmented by wayside detectors. Crews can't see what's going on 8000 ft behind them unless things have already gone terribly wrong. Maybe further along the sensors can feed a computer that does some quick math to establish maximium safe brake pressure given train length, speed, and location in the network. Until then, let the sensors alert the crew, and let their expertise determine how to safely bring the train to a stop. Locomotives have sensors galore.. that same level of technology needs to be applied to the rolling stock. I wonder what the pros and cons are with these various sensor systems. Here is an article about current sensor technology for freight trains: Health Monitoring in Real Time https://www.railwayage.com/news/health-monitoring-in-real-time/
Thanks, this is what I'm talking about..maybe we're not too far from sensors that could have alerted the crew of that E. Palestine train accident before it became catastrophic.
CSX Robert Euclid What make you so sure the price would go up? Why would anyone buy it if there was no payback. The paybak should save money that would be otherwise spent on picking up train wrecks and paying the damage claims, settling law suits, etc. If it would save them money they would've already implemented it.
Sure.. if you have a magic wand. In real life things take time..even good ideas take time, usually years, to develop and implement.
BaltACD Euclid Is that a knee jerk reaction? Your knee is vibrating. Any 'solution' will have some form of cost! Who will participate in paying that cost? A real world question.
Ultimately..you, me, and every other civilized consumer..The cave dwellers we evolved from didn't need any of this stuff..
That is the old saying: "If it were a good idea someone would have already invented it."
Obviously that cannot possibly true. Think about it. If it were true, nothing good would have ever been invented because it all was a bad idea. It had to have been a bad idea because it had never been invented.
And there are excellent new breakthrough ideas and inventions coming forward all the time. The potential for improvement is infinite. There is a constant flow of good and bad invention concepts coming forward. In a lot of cases, when condtions align to make a useful new idea possible, many people see the idea and turn it into the same invention at the same time.
Euclid CSX Robert Euclid What make you so sure the price would go up? Why would anyone buy it if there was no payback. The paybak should save money that would be otherwise spent on picking up train wrecks and paying the damage claims, settling law suits, etc. If it would save them money they would've already implemented it. That is the old saying: "If it were a good idea someone would have already invented it." Obviously that cannot possibly true. Think about it. If it were true, nothing good would have ever been invented because it all was a bad idea. It had to have been a bad idea because it had never been invented. So if nobody has never invented it yet it can't be a good idea. And there are excellent new breakthrough ideas and inventions coming forward all the time. The potential for improvement is infinite. There is a constant flow of good and bad invention concepts coming forward all the time. In a lot of cases, when condtions align to make a useful new idea possible, many people see the idea and turn it into the same invention at the same time.
Obviously that cannot possibly true. Think about it. If it were true, nothing good would have ever been invented because it all was a bad idea. It had to have been a bad idea because it had never been invented. So if nobody has never invented it yet it can't be a good idea.
And there are excellent new breakthrough ideas and inventions coming forward all the time. The potential for improvement is infinite. There is a constant flow of good and bad invention concepts coming forward all the time. In a lot of cases, when condtions align to make a useful new idea possible, many people see the idea and turn it into the same invention at the same time.
And things don't exist..until they do.
BaltACD Ulrich It seems to me that on board sensors would be a good idea to identify problems early on. Sensors that continuously monitor and report data to both the crew and to management, augmented by wayside detectors. Crews can't see what's going on 8000 ft behind them unless things have already gone terribly wrong. Maybe further along the sensors can feed a computer that does some quick math to establish maximium safe brake pressure given train length, speed, and location in the network. Until then, let the sensors alert the crew, and let their expertise determine how to safely bring the train to a stop. Locomotives have sensors galore.. that same level of technology needs to be applied to the rolling stock. Who will maintain the sensors? What will be the Inspection cycle for the sensors? 92 day inspection cycle like it is for locomotives? 5 years like it is for Air Brake Valves? Somewhere in between? Will sensor inspection require the equipment be taken out of service for the inspection? What happens when a sensor fails while moving in a train? Contine? Set the car out?
Another issue to be considered is how well will these sensors hold up in a railroad environment. I would think that they would have to be at least as robust as an EOT device.
If railroads want to continue operating, they need to pay. You seem to be afraid of any costs that hurt the profits, as much as you claim to hate PSR, bean counters and Wall Street. Choose
If corporate types won't take steps to modernize and operate safely, then your hated government will have to take over.
charlie hebdo BaltACD Euclid Is that a knee jerk reaction? Your knee is vibrating. Any 'solution' will have some form of cost! Who will participate in paying that cost? A real world question. If railroads want to continue operating, they need to pay. You seem to be afraid of any costs that hurt the profits, as much as you claim to hate PSR, bean counters and Wall Street. Choose If corporate types won't take steps to modernize and operate safely, then your hated government will have to take over.
As a personal matter I AM not afraid of costs. I AM not the CEO of any Class 1's or any Rail Leasing Companies. They are the ones that will have to deal with the costs going forward.
The Carriers and the Leasors are the ones that have to make decisions about how they will go about moving forward.
Charlie hebdoIf railroads want to continue operating, they need to pay.
There are three players in this particular game.
The railroads are responsible for the railroad. Upgrades to defect detectors, as discussed, will be covered by the railroads.
The second player is the car owners. All of the cars that derailed were private owner cars. They'll be responsible for installing and maintaining the equipment that's been proposed here on the forum.
The third player is you, the consumer. You will end up paying for all of these improvements as the costs are passed along to you. Bulletproof tank cars, axle sensors, changes to detectors - all cost money. You'll see those costs on the shelf at your local big box store. You'll complain about the rising costs of things, but remember - you started it.
Yes - things can be improved, but this was basically an accident. Some undetected flaw in a single roller bearing may get the blame. It could have been a manufacturing flaw, for all we know.
Years ago, following someone's concern about "killer trees" along the highways, someone wrote that we can widen the roads, cut back all the potentially offending trees, etc., but then somebody would end up rolling their car and kill themselves anyhow.
A few years ago, despite well-established warnings for a railroad crossing and clear visibility, a dump truck drove into the side of a passenger train.
Stuff is going to happen. Figure out what did happen, do what can be done to improve it, and get on with life. Things will never be perfect.
tree68 Charlie hebdo If railroads want to continue operating, they need to pay. There are three players in this particular game. The railroads are responsible for the railroad. Upgrades to defect detectors, as discussed, will be covered by the railroads. The second player is the car owners. All of the cars that derailed were private owner cars. They'll be responsible for installing and maintaining the equipment that's been proposed here on the forum. The third player is you, the consumer. You will end up paying for all of these improvements as the costs are passed along to you. Bulletproof tank cars, axle sensors, changes to detectors - all cost money. You'll see those costs on the shelf at your local big box store. You'll complain about the rising costs of things, but remember - you started it. Yes - things can be improved, but this was basically an accident. Some undetected flaw in a single roller bearing may get the blame. It could have been a manufacturing flaw, for all we know. Years ago, following someone's concern about "killer trees" along the highways, someone wrote that we can widen the roads, cut back all the potentially offending trees, etc., but then somebody would end up rolling their car and kill themselves anyhow. A few years ago, despite well-established warnings for a railroad crossing and clear visibility, a dump truck drove into the side of a passenger train. Stuff is going to happen. Figure out what did happen, do what can be done to improve it, and get on with life. Things will never be perfect.
Charlie hebdo If railroads want to continue operating, they need to pay.
To paraphrase tree - When you attempt to 'idiot proof' anything, you just end up finding a higher class of idiots.
Rising consumer prices due to increased safety measures can be counteracted by buying less of everything, especially stuff we don't need in the first place.
Ulrich Rising consumer prices due to increased safety measures can be counteracted by buying less of everything, especially stuff we don't need in the first place.
How would this affect freight traffic?
As I mentioned in one of the other threads, on board bearing monitoring systems already exist and certain passenger operators have decades of experience with them by now. This should give a pretty good baseline for how reliable the sensors are.
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
UlrichRising consumer prices due to increased safety measures can be counteracted by buying less of everything, especially stuff we don't need in the first place.
However, when you don't buy what you don't need anyways, where is the savings. I guess I'd save the most by not buying anything and then dying from starvation.
In the real world we are humans and will pay what is necessary to live the ways we want to live and complain all the way to the ballot box.
Likely sensor reliability and capability will grow exponentially over the next decade, and prices will come down just as prices for other electronics have come down over the years. And coupled with The Internet of Things.. the possibilities are limitless.. Hey, I'm wearing a sensor right now that tells me my step count today, my heart rate and a bunch of other stuff..Soon most everything will have some kind of sensor..
The East Palestine wreck is almost certainly a 'perfect storm' of the train being in precisely the wrong location relative to wayside detection as possible. The likely proposed 'solution' is for detector spacing to be reduced; if I were a politician's staffer I'd look at 15-mile spacing for regular traffic, 'every signal block' for lines with any extended PTC consists.
Any other solution is (1) completely separate from the network of wayside detectors -- including any cameras checking the trains -- and it would have to be continuous monitoring. It would also (2) be more useful for maintenance scheduling than detecting the extremely unlikely catastrophic failure of a M-942 lubricated AP bearing between fixed detector intervals. There are ways to make this more cost-effective (I am currently working on two facets of this) but making them even halfway safety-critical involves an amount of data gathering and transmission integrity that only 'makes sense' in a world that would permit zero-man crews... and even then, you can bet there would be some combination of holes in the Swiss cheese that would let something get through.
Something else that has to be mentioned at some point is that even slight wheeltread damage may induce accelerated bearing failure. Continuous onboard monitoring would catch when this damage occurs, and flag whether it is progressively worsening, but the consequent implication is that the wheelset get swapped, or if possible remediated, ASAP... which does not mean running it a thousand miles damaged until the load is delivered and the car gets to a maintenance facility.
The reason I brought up the possible effect on consumer prices was chiefly to point out that this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. May seem obvious, but sometimes people get too focused.
Another factor that has a place at the table is the Mean Time Between Failures of the bearings. Of course, that has to be spread out over the thousands of miles of track and the hundreds of thousands of railcars, but I'm sure the bearing manufacturers have a pretty good idea.
It is encouraging that the technology already exists, and can develop further toward implementation. Perhaps the railroads will begin to develop the infrastructure necessary to support it (especially on lines handling significant hazmat) and the fielding of the equipment on cars. Acknowledging that the equipment exists, etc, will go a long way toward preventing the imposition of a legislative or other regulatory solution.
As we saw with East Palestine, however, the effort can't be limited to hazmat cars. It needs to be universal.
Over the longer term more sophisticated sensors will bring down the cost of transportation..fewer accidents..earlier identification of problems before they become expensive repairs..better allocation of resources..better reliability.
And then there are the big picture considerations that have nothing to do with technology..i.e. does it make sense to truck Christmas trees from Oregon to Ontario?..ship bottled water from Ontario to Texas?..cardboard from New Jersey to California?..widgets from China? Alot of what's shipped is necessarily.. but alot of it is superfluous too..and once again we're reminded (by accidents like E Palestine) that transportation entails enormous risk as well as the obvious cost..and that risk can sometimes be out of all proportion to the end benefit to the consumer.
In this case it's not about "save them money".. 75% of the North American car fleet is private.. What incentive would be needed for them to absorb the cost of onboard bearing monitioring and detection?
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