One year later (sleep thread)

[John WR]

jeffhergert

There is, and has been for many years, a rule requiring crew members to call signals to each other when they come into view.

Maybe we should adapt some traditional railroad safety practices into our own personal lives.  

[Anonymous]

Murphy Siding

Earlier, you mentioned the Smart Cap would help weed out who shouldn't be operating a train due to a tendency to have sleep issues.  Now, you're changing your tune, and saying the Smart Cap should be used to wake up the engineer when he falls asleep???

The SmartCap or similar smart alerter system can do both, and it will be used for both purposes. It will act like a wakeup alarm just as the current alerters do, but unlike current alerters, the smart alerter will not just give timed alarms as a wake up test in case an engineer is sleeping.

Instead, the smart alerter will only alarm if an engineer is sleeping because it will be able to tell if a person is sleeping. It will also be able to determine if a person is engaged in any of those half asleep, daydreaming, distracted modes of consciousness that you mentioned, and will alarm for those too.

So for the alerter function, this smart alerter will do everything that is needed to assure alertness. It cannot be reset reflexively by a sleeping person, and it will completely monitor consciousness from wide awake, fully alert to sound asleep and everything in between.

And the smart alerter will also capture all of the information that it picks up in monitoring employees. This information will be part of an employee’s record, and it will be analyzed for indications of sleep disorders or simply fatigue resulting from neglecting proper rest.

So yes, it will be a tool for diagnosing sleep disorders as I predicted a year ago, and it will also be real time consciousness monitor that can stop the train if it finds the engineer incapacitated or even distracted to a significant degree. It really fulfills every need in this topic of operator fatigue in safety sensitive work.

With the current alerters, an engineer can fall asleep 100 times a shift and if it does not result in an accident, nobody will ever know. With the smart alerters, the 100 instances of falling asleep will be recorded and be added to an employee’s record.

It also eliminates the need and purpose of inward facing cameras, but I wonder what labor unions will say about the intrusiveness of the smart alerters.

[Murphy Siding]

     Now it's morphed into a PTC Cap !

     It will also function a  *black box* in the event of an accident-similar to airline black boxes.  It will be able to record the level of awakeness in brain located just below the Black Box Cap upon impact.  What's more, it becomes a usefull tool to weed out those individuals not acceptable for train service AND those the railroad wishes to send down the road for whatever reasons.  I'd wager that anybody wearing a Black Box Cap for a 12 hour shift will have at least one instance of having the red-alert! alarm go off.

     The Black Box Cap will be able to tell if the engineer is awake.  It won't be able to tell if he is paying attention to the signals.  Maybe, you're barking up the wrong tree.  The technology should be used to have the train read the signal, and convey the information to the engineer-loudly if neccessary:  ##DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!  RED SIGNAL AHEAD!!  DANGER WILL ROBINSON!! RED SIGNAL AHEAD!!##

[Murphy Siding]

zugmann

Maybe we can just train the cap to run the trains?

  It would be a short technological jump to just have the cap control the engineer's brain waves.  They'll start with your brain waves, and pretty soon they're messin' with your precious bodily fluids.

[blownout cylinder]

Murphy Siding

zugmann

Maybe we can just train the cap to run the trains?

  It would be a short technological jump to just have the cap control the engineer's brain waves.  They'll start with your brain waves, and pretty soon they're messin' with your precious bodily fluids.

Is that when you would need a drool cup?

[John WR]

Murphy Siding

   Now it's morphed into a PTC Cap !

Maybe, just maybe, some consideration could be given to allowing railroad engineers and conductors to get an occasional night's sleep.

[Overmod]

John WR

Murphy Siding

   Now it's morphed into a PTC Cap !

Maybe, just maybe, some consideration could be given to allowing railroad engineers and conductors to get an occasional night's sleep.

Common sense?  In a discussion like this one?

I'm a bit amused no one has put the last two suggestions together.  If the PTC cap controls the engineer's brainwaves, and the PTC cap can run the train, why not set the cap up so it ENCOURAGES the engineer to get needed sleep, or appropriate quality sleep for the minimum safe time (determined for that person's individual characteristics), and then operate the train safely during the interval of sleep?  Fire up some 'Russian sleep-inducer plates' attached strategic places on the cap, if dormitive activity is not initiated in the software-specified time interval, or does not persist with high assurance for the appropriately-determined requisite duration?*  Not much different, and probably "safer" by Government statistical measurement methods, than having the conductor do a bit of ghost-running.

What may be still more amusing is having the engineer call the signals while asleep, as the cap controls his speech.  Would this be like Saberhagen's berserkers, or the voice of Colossus?

* I can translate this into actual English if anyone has trouble speaking military-industrial...

[Anonymous]

Murphy Siding

Now it's morphed into a PTC Cap !

It will indeed morph into PTC.  The two are converging technologies.  Ultimately, the sleep alerter function of PTC will need to monitor brain waves and other physiological data just as the currently developing advanced alerters will do in the meantime.

PTC will eliminate the need to call signals because it will not depend on human response to signals.  PTC will also morph into train operation such as throttle and speed control for responding to signal indications as well as other running conditions. 

Furthermore, it will make signal indications obsolete because there will be no need to visually indicate signals to trainmen.  And ultimately, there won’t be a need to monitor sleep and alertness because there will be nothing left for those deficiencies to jeopardize. 

[Murphy Siding]

Bucyrus

Murphy Siding

Now it's morphed into a PTC Cap !

It will indeed morph into PTC.  The two are converging technologies.  Ultimately, the sleep alerter function of PTC will need to monitor brain waves and other physiological data just as the currently developing advanced alerters will do in the meantime.

PTC will eliminate the need to call signals because it will not depend on human response to signals.  PTC will also morph into train operation such as throttle and speed control for responding to signal indications as well as other running conditions. 

Furthermore, it will make signal indications obsolete because there will be no need to visually indicate signals to trainmen.  And ultimately, there won’t be a need to monitor sleep and alertness because there will be nothing left for those deficiencies to jeopardize. 

   Nor would there be a need to have anyone- asleep, awake, or otherwise- in the cab.  The next logical step, will be to put the Orwell caps on all those drivers who have the potential to cause collisions at grade crossings.

     It's a conspiracy.  It's all run by a big, eastern syndicate don't cha know?  -Lucy Vanpelt

[tree68]

There is a prototype for this hat, I've found.  Here's a picture:

[Anonymous]

Murphy Siding

Bucyrus

Murphy Siding

Now it's morphed into a PTC Cap !

It will indeed morph into PTC.  The two are converging technologies. 

PTC will also morph into train operation such as throttle and speed control for responding to signal indications as well as other running conditions. 

And ultimately, there won’t be a need to monitor sleep and alertness because there will be nothing left for those deficiencies to jeopardize. 

   Nor would there be a need to have anyone- asleep, awake, or otherwise- in the cab. 

 

That is correct.

 

[zugmann]

Bucyrus

 

That is correct.

 

But once we automate everything, nobody will be working, so nobody will have any money to buy anything, so we won't have to transport anything.  It all works out, I guess.

[Murphy Siding]

zugmann

Bucyrus

 

That is correct.

 

But once we automate everything, nobody will be working, so nobody will have any money to buy anything, so we won't have to transport anything.  It all works out, I guess.

  If the Orwell caps, and their high-tech back-up work as well as most business computers, the real job growth would be in the computer geeks needed to keep them running.

[John WR]

zugmann

But once we automate everything, nobody will be working, so nobody will have any money to buy anything, so we won't have to transport anything.  It all works out, I guess.

Zugmann,  

That is logical.  But somehow things have not worked out that way.  Today more things are automated than we have ever had in all of our history.  But we are not poorer than we have ever been in our history.  

John

[Anonymous]

zugmann

Bucyrus

 

That is correct.

 

But once we automate everything, nobody will be working, so nobody will have any money to buy anything, so we won't have to transport anything.  It all works out, I guess.

Well if it is any consolation, I expect the PTC mandate to delay this Orwellian development to replace human control of trains.  Clearly there is a trajectory leading to this objective that was being advanced as rapidly as possible by the most efficient means of decision making and research investment.  But the PTC mandate displaces that efficient progress by imposing a ham handed, bureaucratic approach that is bound to stymie the meaningful progress. 

[blownout cylinder]

mmmmmm...I could see this develop into a movie plot....HAL9000 being created to drive the cap.....

[BroadwayLion]

zugmann

But once we automate everything, nobody will be working, so nobody will have any money to buy anything, so we won't have to transport anything.  It all works out, I guess.

Not really. The long haul crew jobs may disappear, but once the trains arrive at a terminal or a yard, they will need full crews. With efficiencies comes more business, which means more work, it is just not the same work.

You build the train, attach the road locomotives, and the railroad does the rest.

Train comes in, you detach and service the road units, switch your train and do what is needed.

All of those local freights need at least one crewman. That is what they pout on some of those things out here... You run the train to the customers siding, climb off of the train and run it with the remote, open and closed fences, gates, switches, couple and uncouple. Inspect the train, the brakes, the hoses and gland hands. There is and will always be a lot of work, but we get rig of long road jobs, letting the machine do that..

LION does not see work going away.

ROAR

[Anonymous]

Here is an interesting account of sleeping on the alterter and reflexive resetting:

 

7. The 2004 Macdona Accident, and Automatic Behavior Syndrome

Additional insight on “alerter naps”, microsleep episodes, and the limitations of conventional activity-based alerters can be found in the 2006 NTSB investigation report of a collision between two freight trains in Macdona Texas at 5:03AM on June 28, 2004 [25].

The engineer and conductor of an activity-based alerter equipped32 freight locomotive had both accumulated significant sleep debt33. The engineer had been driving slowly west bound, fighting sleep for at least 45 minutes prior to the accident, and the conductor was probably fully asleep. Evidence suggests the engineer had a microsleep episode, but roused himself and made a precautionary speed reduction using dynamic brakes and slowed the train to 22 mph.

However, thereafter he apparently drifted in and out of micro-sleep. He made inappropriate successive throttle increases, and the train speed increased to 44 mph. He failed to sound the horn at two crossings, ignored successive approach and stop wayside signals, did not dim his headlight as he passed the head end of an eastbound freight moving in the opposite direction on the adjacent siding. More importantly, he failed realize that the oncoming freight might not be fully off the main track.

Two minutes later he collided with the middle of the eastbound consist34. NTSB investigators noted the engineer “remained sufficiently alert to make train control inputs yet [was] unable to respond to vitally important signal indications. [This] could be explained by the fact that making such inputs and manipulating the alerter are highly practiced, nearly reflexive, motor responses that require only lower level cognitive effort.

During the engineer’s transition from wakefulness into the normal perceptual disengagement of unintended sleep, his capacity for information processing would have been severely compromised. Thus, he could have been able to continue the reflexive control activities, while being unable to perform the higher level cognitive tasks of extrapolating information from the signal indications.”

The NTSB’s interpretation of the Macdona engineer’s behavior during micro-sleep episodes is supported by clinical descriptions of “Automatic Behavior Syndrome (ABS)” [26] common among patients who complain of excessive daytime sleepiness for various medical reasons35. In ABS, periods of automatic behavior last from seconds to hours, and have been polysomnographically correlated with repetitive micros-sleep periods. “The episodes typically involve the continuation of an activity that does not require extensive skill…The state will develop more easily if the patient is doing a monotonous task…An example is driving an automobile for more than a few miles….The patient is usually fighting against a feeling of drowsiness, and becomes less aware of his actions as performance deteriorates…Simple answers to simple questions [may appear normal] but attempts at complex answers are abortive and inappropriate. Actions which do not require skill will be performed satisfactorily albeit in a semi-automatic way; however if a sudden and well-planned decision is required, the patient will be unable to adapt appropriately to the new demand.

Amnesia is a very common characteristic…A patient cannot remember what has happened during these episodes, though he may have some images like a “broken movie.. The notion of time is completely annihilated…patients may think that a very few seconds or minutes have elapsed when sometimes several hours have passed.” [26]. It has been suggested that automatic behavior is an admixture or rapid oscillation between waking and non-REM sleep states. [27] There is enough wakefulness to perform complex behavior, but not enough for conscious awareness of them [28].

 

The above is quoted from the following link starting at page 20:

http://mvl.mit.edu/MVLpubs/OmanLiu_AlerterTechnologyAssessment_2007.pdf

 

[BroadwayLion]

LION agrees with this. LION is always sleepy, and is good thing he does not try to run locomotives at night.

Yesterday, I went into the church (1630)  to read scripture a half an hour before Mass, but could not keep my eyes open. I closed the book and went to my room to drink some Diet Pepsi and to rest a few minutes before Mass. During Mass (1700)  I was nodding off and after Mass I went to the cafeteria, set out meds for those who needed meds, took one look at the steam table (rice, chicken, peas) and decided: No, lets go an take a nap instead.

I went to my room, took off my habit and put on my C-PAP mask. I did not put fresh water in the machine: I would only rest two hours until Vespers.

At 11:30 (2330) I awoke because the machine had gone dry (and puts out a gross smell for some reason). I was still tired, I refilled the machine, set out a fresh bottle of Diet Pepsi, but my pajamas on, and slept through to 0500. When I awoke I finally felt rested. And that was after 11 hours of sleep.

Now what would have happened if I was trying to operate a locomotive during this time.

ROAR

[Anonymous]

I detect that the findings from the study of sleep disorders have shifted over the last ten years or so in a rather fundamental way.  Previously, the belief was that sleep lost to inadequate sleep each night was cumulative, and would form a so called “sleep deficit.”  The sleep deficit would make it harder to stay awake during the normal waking hours, and would continue to do so until it was paid back by getting enough extra sleep to offset it.  So the fundamental cause was a loss of sleep for whatever reason.  A person could suffer from this no matter what time of the day or night they slept.

Now, the thinking seems to have shifted to the premise that night shift work places the body out of phase with the circadian rhythm, and this has several negative health effects including insomnia.  The loss of sleep due to insomnia then causes fatigue during the waking hours.  So now the fundamental cause is nightshift work.  Most interestingly, this seemingly revised definition of sleep disorders makes the problem much harder to remedy.   

[tree68]

I'm not sure that you can separate the two. 

As I believe has already been discussed, one of the worst things a night shift worker can do (even one who is not on rotating shifts) is to try to  "day shift" on his/her days off.

Having been a shift worker, I can identify with this fully.

A cardinal rule of rotating shifts is to always shift forward, ie, days to eves, eves to mids, mids to days.  Apparently the body can better adjust to this.  Another consideration is length of shift, days-wise.  Rotating weekly is going to be far more stressful than monthly, or as we worked, six weeks at a time.

It would benefit the body of knowledge to know if someone who works a night shift consistently for long periods has the same issues as one who rotates through periodically.

All that said - it is about circadian rhythms - and a host of other issues which affect one's ability to fall asleep.  Anyone who has stayed at a motel near a busy highway can identify with that.  Especially if the bedding is different than what they are used to.

And none of this addresses the railroad issue of irregular work hours, sleep interruptions, and what-have-you, all of which has also been discussed.

[Anonymous]

This following excerpt describes how the NTSB wanted alerters that could not be reset while asleep.  But the effort was ultimately thwarted by the preference to wait for Positive Train Separation:

 

The Safety Board has closely examined the role of alerters. In the collision of two Norfolk Southern Railway freight trains at Sugar Valley, Georgia, on August 9, 1990, the crew of one of the trains failed to stop at a signal. The Board concluded that the engineer of that train was probably experiencing a micro-sleep or was distracted. Based on testing, it was determined that as the train approached the stop signal, the alerter would have begun an alarm cycle. The Board concluded that the engineer “could have cancelled the alerter system while he was asleep by a simple reflex action that he performed without conscious thought.” As a result of the investigation, the Board made the following recommendation to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA):

R-91-26

In conjunction with the study of fatigue of train crewmembers, explore the parameters of an optimum alerter system for locomotives.

 

The FRA responded to this recommendation on June 28, 1993, advising that it had “awarded two contracts to develop proposals to modify the existing alerter systems so that they cannot be reset by reflex action.” In a followup letter dated August 12, 1997, the FRA told the Safety Board that while a proposal for a prototype had been developed, the contractor had advised the FRA that “they could not see a market for the device large enough to justify its further development.”

The FRA advised the Safety Board that it believed that the lack of a market was due to the FRA’s own “announced determination” to support positive train separation technology. As a result, the Safety Board classified Safety Recommendation R-91-26 “Closed—Unacceptable Action” on November 4, 1997.

 

The above quoted from this link:

http://www.ntsb.gov/doclib/recletters/2007/R07_8.pdf