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Ever wonder how a B747 can fall out of the sky if only one part breaks? It's because all the other parts can't carry on without it. Railroads are no different. One thing breaks, and the whole system starts to grind to a halt. The railroad version of flight is the fixed guideway: you can't steer around it and continue on as if nothing happened, and you can't do without it. Plus, the locomotives, cars, and crew are all already being figured for future trains, so you're affecting future trains, not just the ones you have on hand. Railroads run 24 hours a day -- they have no makeup time every night like an airline or your average workplace, where the timer can be reset to zero for the next morning and you start over and have chronological forgiveness for everything that went out of kilter the day before. And when something goes wrong on a railroad, it isn't right there next to you in the office where you can reach out and grab it. Or out on the factory floor under lights, temperature control, and clean conditions. It's 423 miles away from you, 20 minutes on foot from the nearest 4WD road, in the middle of the night, in the mud, in a pouring rainstorm, in a windstorm, the power has failed, the microwave carrier for the radio has failed, and your nearest maintainer has 92 minutes left on his hours of service, it's a Saturday morning, the roadmaster is on vacation, the signal maintainer is laid up with a broken ankle, and you've got 18 trains holding while you're wondering what the hell to do next as one of them reports 24 inches of water over the rail and another reports a bank failure along a cresting river. Standing still starts to seem like a bad idea, but do you dare move one of them ... right into a washout? Oh -- I'm not dreaming this up. It describes one night a few weeks ago. It wasn't all that unusual a night on anyone's railroad. Ever throw a rock into a small, still puddle, and see the ripples reflect and refract for the next minute? Write a mathematical formula that predicts the magnitude, frequency, and position of each wave crest one minute into the future, accounting for all the variations in the shoreline and water depth of that pond. Essentially it describes how one car can affect one railroad on one day. Now drop 100,000 pieces of gravel into a good sized pond all at once, and write a mathematical formula that predicts the surface of the pond 1 second, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, and one minute later. That describes the typical day on a Class I railroad. We know in broad terms what's going to happen -- a bunch of ripples. In specific terms, no one has a clue where each wave crest will be, when. Mathematically speaking, railroads are nonlinear dynamic systems that give rise to chaotic and unpredictable results that oscillate within broad boundaries. Every single variable has influence on every other variable because of the nature of the fixed guideway. Consider these unpredictabilities that are all in play for one train on one mile of average track at any given instant: 1. Discontinuity of track -- broken rail, washout, track buckle, wide gauge, etc. 2. Foreign object on track -- boulder, large animal, motor vehicle, trespasser 3. Failure of locomotives -- each a system of many thousand dependent parts 4. Failure of any one of 100+ cars -- each a system of a few hundred dependent parts 5. Failure of signal system -- itself reliant on long-distance communication systems 6. Failure of line power -- no signal power results 7. Failure of human crew -- they fall asleep, don't show up, miss a signal, etc. 8. Failure of dispatcher -- he focuses on something else, gets behind, etc. 9. Failure of fuel -- it happens! And so forth: over 100,000 interdependent parts all present in a single train and a single mile of track of which the failure of any one has the substantial if not absolute potential to stop that train, and thus affect every other train to a distance of hundreds of miles away. If the train is stopped, for say, just one hour, the crew, for instance, now ties up one hour later, which means your ability to use them again 12 hours later has been altered. It affects every train it connects with. It affects every train it meets with. It may result in some of the cars missing connections, dwelling in a yard 24 hours, occupying a track the YM would usually use for something else, spilling into effects on how that yard works, delaying five more trains a few minutes each, etc. This page describes some of the efforts to describe non-linear dynamic systems with math: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map Don't ask me to explain it; this level of math is about as far as I can grasp in a very general sense. If it was as simple as an IT problem or a central dispatching office, the railroads would have done it already. What would be the point of staffing a facility to consider information that can't be predicted? Some insufferable twit from the Economist shows up, sees a fax machine instead of some fancy workstations, and tut-tuts at the ignorance of these poor backward railroaders. Perhaps his self-importance blinded him to the possibility that railroads do it this way because anything more elaborate is a waste of money that would create more problems than it solved. But, having already filled his head with all the knowledge he'll ever need, he simply compares railroads against airlines, like railroads are some sort of brutish stone-age tribe and airlines the "civilized world." I think I'd like to ask him, "If airlines are so clever and sophisticated, how is it that their net profit since Wilbur Wright fluttered into the air is $0.00? OS
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