The answer to the original question really becomes another question - when will a technological advance be as simple and reliable as the current technology? Further, when will the cost of that technological advance be such that it becomes economically worth the cost.
Bearing in mind that we're not talking about the introduction of such items as Janney couplers or Westinghouse brakes and the safety they brought to railroading. Rather we're looking at replacements for such items, most specifically brakes.
Are railroads behind the technology curve? Maybe, but I'll bet most of us still just tie a square knot instead of reaching for a handful of nylon zip ties...
As I sit here typing this it occurs to me - what if we were to take PTC to another level - each individual car equipped with PTC? Then each car could become an enforcer of speed limits specifically. Then even a runaway car (if it were able to apply brakes) would be held to the speed limit.. Of course, the buff and slack forces in a train might then become totally unpredictable.... Probably not a good idea. I think we'll forget about that one.
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...
In a broad and general sense, I would not say that railroading is behind the curve of technological development. But I would say that the curve is suddenly about to radically change. Two things are going to change it. One is the rapid increase in crude oil shipping by rail, and other is the rapid increase in public demand for greater oil train safety. I don’t think there is any time in history when the need to change has come on so strong and rapidly.
"New and Improved" often isn't.
Jeff
I doubt that the actual need for improvement or the effectiveness of the improvements will be all that important. What will be important is to look like they are doing something about the problem. And it is not like the industry is going to have the privilege of deciding what is cost effective.
Look what the Chatsworth wreck did for advancing PTC. What is coming will be much more powerful than the fallout from the Chatsworth wreck.
Getting back to my original point, we in the trucking industry use a SPRING brake mechanism which is activated when air pressure in the system DECREASES. It works in a manner opposite to how the service brakes work. Air pressure is used to compress a heavy duty spring on each wheel. When the air pressure in the system drops the air in the brake chamber containing the spring can no longer hold the spring, and the spring brake is applied. I see no reason why a brake like that could not be adapted for railway purposes. You simply need to bleed air out of the system through a valve on the locomotive in order for all "parking" brakes on the train to apply instantaneously. . It works like a charm on trucks, and I've have had the dubious pleasure of first hand experience to attest to that.
UlrichYou simply need to bleed air out of the system through a valve on the locomotive in order for all "parking" brakes on the train to apply instantaneously.
Unfortunately, you just made Houston Ed's workday a lot longer. When kicking cars, the brakes need to be completely released so the car is free rolling. It would appear that your idea would require bottling the air on each car so it could be kicked, and possibly connecting and pumping up a car before it could be switched.
We usually put our passenger cars on air to move them, and we don't kick them - we couple them up under power. We're normally only switching a couple of cars when we do - I can't imagine the chaos if one was trying to switch hundreds of cars a day.
No bottled air required. All you need to do is to charge the system. with air. The air pressure holds each spring in a compressed state so long as there is sufficient air in the system.
No, they are not.
An "expensive model collector"
Ulrich Getting back to my original point, we in the trucking industry use a SPRING brake mechanism which is activated when air pressure in the system DECREASES. It works in a manner opposite to how the service brakes work. Air pressure is used to compress a heavy duty spring on each wheel. When the air pressure in the system drops the air in the brake chamber containing the spring can no longer hold the spring, and the spring brake is applied. I see no reason why a brake like that could not be adapted for railway purposes. You simply need to bleed air out of the system through a valve on the locomotive in order for all "parking" brakes on the train to apply instantaneously. . It works like a charm on trucks, and I've have had the dubious pleasure of first hand experience to attest to that.
That is a natural idea for a fail-safe brake. If you lose the air, the brakes still set. The original railroad air brakes were straight air, and the obvious problem was that if the train breaks in two, you lose all braking on both halves because the train line is open at the break. So Westinghouse invented the triple valve, and a whole new pneumatic strategy that applies the air brakes by reducing the train line pressure, as opposed to the straight air system where you pressurize the train line to apply the brakes.
The spring loaded cylinder system would also apply with a reduction of train line pressure. Whatever all the pros and cons of the spring system versus the triple valve system, the industry adopted the triple valve system at a time when the spring system was an obvious alternative. I don’t think that the spring system will replace the triple valve system at this point.
The advantage of the spring system over the triple valve system is that the springs will not disengage over time like the triple valve system will disengage due to leakage. Assuming the current air brake system is here to stay, a parking brake could still be developed as an addition that would leave the standard air brake system intact.
I am sure there a bunch of patents of workable systems of parking brakes. While a parking brake system should be an add-on to the standard air brake system, it could still utilize the pneumatic cylinders of the standard air brake system for the application of brakes when functioning as the parking brakes. But when you disengage the add-on parking brake system, it leaves the standard air brakes to function as they presently do.
Ulrich No bottled air required. All you need to do is to charge the system. with air. The air pressure holds each spring in a compressed state so long as there is sufficient air in the system.
So how would you kick a car?
It's been fun. But it isn't much fun anymore. Signing off for now.
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, any other railroad, company, or person.t fun any
zugmann Ulrich No bottled air required. All you need to do is to charge the system. with air. The air pressure holds each spring in a compressed state so long as there is sufficient air in the system. So how would you kick a car?
You build the system that I described.
A "smart" freight car with it's own energy source and communication scheme could do all sorts of things. Technically feasible. Not mature technology. Expensive. Soft benefits and hard costs are generally a non-starter for companies that have hard savings/increased revenue from alternative investments - like building intermodal terminals.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
Bucyrus Ulrich Getting back to my original point, we in the trucking industry use a SPRING brake mechanism which is activated when air pressure in the system DECREASES. It works in a manner opposite to how the service brakes work. Air pressure is used to compress a heavy duty spring on each wheel. When the air pressure in the system drops the air in the brake chamber containing the spring can no longer hold the spring, and the spring brake is applied. I see no reason why a brake like that could not be adapted for railway purposes. You simply need to bleed air out of the system through a valve on the locomotive in order for all "parking" brakes on the train to apply instantaneously. . It works like a charm on trucks, and I've have had the dubious pleasure of first hand experience to attest to that. That is a natural idea for a fail-safe brake. If you lose the air, the brakes still set. The original railroad air brakes were straight air, and the obvious problem was that if the train breaks in two, you lose all braking on both halves because the train line is open at the break. So Westinghouse invented the triple valve, and a whole new pneumatic strategy that applies the air brakes by reducing the train line pressure, as opposed to the straight air system where you pressurize the train line to apply the brakes. The spring loaded cylinder system would also apply with a reduction of train line pressure. Whatever all the pros and cons of the spring system versus the triple valve system, the industry adopted the triple valve system at a time when the spring system was an obvious alternative. I don’t think that the spring system will replace the triple valve system at this point. The advantage of the spring system over the triple valve system is that the springs will not disengage over time like the triple valve system will disengage due to leakage. Assuming the current air brake system is here to stay, a parking brake could still be developed as an addition that would leave the standard air brake system intact. I am sure there a bunch of patents of workable systems of parking brakes. While a parking brake system should be an add-on to the standard air brake system, it could still utilize the pneumatic cylinders of the standard air brake system for the application of brakes when functioning as the parking brakes. But when you disengage the add-on parking brake system, it leaves the standard air brakes to function as they presently do.
Springs are a bad idea. They lose their temper, crack and break from low cycle fatigue. They also have variable force with distance - not ideal when dealing with brake shoes that can wear a couple inches. You'd either need a super-reliable slack adjuster or some other system to adjust for this.
A worm and screw parking brake would be better. They already exist on locomotives.
I am not advocating springs; at least not as the working force to apply brakes; either for service or parking.
I guess I'm at a loss here. It sounds like you want to turn the current brake system on it's ear. Where does the air come from if the car has been sitting for several days? What holds the air in the car to keep the brakes released?
As it is, if the railroad wants to switch a bunch of cars, they can just dump the air from the cylinders in each of the cars - something that can be done by any crewman or member of the car department. Once the car is bled, it's free rolling (if the handbrake is released).
If the air leaks off a spring system, does the car stop mid-kick? Or halfway down the hump? That would put a definite damper in switching operations.
The current "Westinghouse" brake system works just fine, except there's no way to remotely initiate a "parking brake" mode. As noted, the railroad industry went that route, rather than the spring application route for reasons we don't necessarily have handy.
Is it really necessary to have such a system to set the "parking brakes." Sure, it might have helped with the Quebec incident, but so would have properly tying down the train. Methinks we're trying to solve a problem that really doesn't exist.
We in the trucking industry like springs. In 28 years I can count on one hand the number of problems we've encountered with a faulty spring. To the point made about springs supplying a variable force, true, but that doesn't matter in the application its designed for. After all the spring is only used for two purposes: parking and for emergency stops. In both cases you need something that is either OFF or fully applied...i.e. you never need a slight amount of parking brake or a gentle application of the emergency brake. Its all or nothing, and the spring is fine for that.
To your point Trees, starting with a clean sheet of paper and redesigning the entire system for railroads might not be such a bad idea. As an industry outsider looking in, I see the need for people to climb all over equipment to set brakes as outdated and archaic. Sure it works.. but I think we can do much better. We landed men on the moon almost 50 years ago now. We are able to remotely control rovers on other planets, yet for some reason a train brake that doesn't require someone to laboriously climb all over equipment continues to allude us. We should be able to do that by flipping a switch, and that system should also be flexible enough to allow the kicking of cars and whatever else is required in normal day to day railroad operations. I think it CAN be done!
tree68what if we were to take PTC to another level - each individual car equipped with PTC? Then each car could become an enforcer of speed limits specifically. Then even a runaway car (if it were able to apply brakes) would be held to the speed limit.. Of course, the buff and slack forces in a train might then become totally unpredictable.... Probably not a good idea. I think we'll forget about that one.
Instead of equipping each car with full PTC, why not supply wireless equipment that is self-powered and that can communicate simple things like brake pressure or state of handbrake tension. This is not difficult to attach to, say, the kind of sensor box that is glued to a 3-piece sideframe over the bearing and measures wheel vibration and potential bearing failure. Now every car becomes a reporter of its condition. And if it starts rolling down the main accidentally -- it can send its position and speed, activate the equivalent of calling post to railroad departments and, if desired, public agencies, set off lights or horns, and yes, activate some form of braking if equipped.
It might be interesting for some of you to look here for a few interesting concepts -- interesting because people have proposed things very similar in a number of recent threads. As a further reference if anybody wants to ask what the current state of development is: here are the official contacts:
Monique.Stewart@dot.gov 202-493-6358John.Punwani@dot.gov 202-493-6369
Overmod Now every car becomes a reporter of its condition. And if it starts rolling down the main accidentally -- it can send its position and speed, activate the equivalent of calling post to railroad departments and, if desired, public agencies, set off lights or horns, and yes, activate some form of braking if equipped. Monique.Stewart@dot.gov 202-493-6358John.Punwani@dot.gov 202-493-6369
Now every car becomes a reporter of its condition. And if it starts rolling down the main accidentally -- it can send its position and speed, activate the equivalent of calling post to railroad departments and, if desired, public agencies, set off lights or horns, and yes, activate some form of braking if equipped.
That's exactly what I mean. We already have all that in my industry. Example.. the onboard diagnostic system has identified that the left inside rear tire is running hot. An email is automatically sent to us and to the nearest shop in our network, and the driver is notified. The vehicle is routed in (or a service person is sent out to meet the truck) and the problem is taken care of. All we had to do is contact the receiver to notify them of a short delay, but I'm sure that within months those diagnostic systems will take care of that small detail as well. Thanks to ever smarter technology, unexpected events like fires will become less frequent because any malfunction that would lead up to a fire would be identified and corrected early on.
Everything I am reading here comes from the present 'aura' of since a rule was (or appears to have been) violated - lets do 20 other things - 20 other expensive things to prevent a person from not performing their duties. And we wonder how there end up being $600 toilet seats and $300 hammer handles.
Didn't we have a problem with a Mars lander several years ago - where part the calculations were done in metric and part were done in feet and inches - and the lander crash landed because Mars wasn't as far away as the sum of the calculations indicated it was.
Men have to be held accountable for their actions - be it applying sufficient hand brakes to hold a train - paying attention to a planes flight status so as not to fly hundreds of mile past the destination - stopping for activated railroad crossing protection.
The world's economy exists for the benefit of MAN. It supports MAN, it provides employment for MAN, it is driven by the wants and needs of MAN Take MAN out of the economy and the world, as we know it, collapses.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
BaltACD Everything I am reading here comes from the present 'aura' of since a rule was (or appears to have been) violated - lets do 20 other things - 20 other expensive things to prevent a person from not performing their duties. And we wonder how there end up being $600 toilet seats and $300 hammer handles.
This was a big problem. I think we need at least 40 technologies. Maybe 50.
We have an obligation to intelligently use the best technology available. If the test was that any new technology must never fail then we would all still be riding horses and cooking over an open flame.
The Lac Megantic accident was, I believe, caused in part by outdated technology. A modern self diagnostic system would have alerted someone to the potential of a fire long before it happened. As it was, some guy in Nantes who happened to be walking his dog noticed the fire and alerted the fire department. That (to me anyway) should never happen. An oil train should be equipped with the latest technology. That doesn't excuse the engineer for any mistakes he may have made; however, we can't expect him to be efficient when we provide him with old locomotives, sketchy track, and technology that was outdated 50 years ago.
I find it interesting that there's always so much pushback on new technology. I recall when power steering came in for trucks back in the 70s. Although I wasn't yet involved in the industry at that time, I recall vocal opposition from many drivers... because power steering is too complex for trucks..power steering is for sissies, and power steering is dangerous and unreliable.
Now we get the same about automated transmissions. I have drivers who want nothing to do with them because (they say) it takes the control away from the driver. That's nonsense of course. Getting back to trains, over the last two or three decades we've decimated employment on the railroads while overall tonnages have increased substantially. We owe it to those few remaining workers to provide them with the best technology available.. sending one man into the backwoods of Quebec with 75 loads of oil on outdated fire prone equipment is just not acceptable..
The brakemen of the late 1800s resisted the introduction of the air brake because it made their job less manly. Switchmen resisted the link and pin coupler safety paddles for the same reason.
I am not advocating a need for changing anything. Hand brakes are the perfect technology if people use them properly. What I am talking about has nothing to do with just another train wreck. The industry is not going to have the luxury of arguing that their system is already perfect. The incident in Quebec has started its own runaway train of public opinion. Change is going to be demanded whether it is needed or not. A perceptive industry will recognize the marketing that will be needed just to survive this onslaught public and regulatory scrutiny that is rolling their way.
But I suspect the naysayers are probably right that there will be so much resistance in such a big system of entrenched ways of doing things that they will not be able to comply with the new mandates. Just giving up the oil business will be much easier than changing their way of doing things.
BucyrusThe incident in Quebec has started its own runaway train of public opinion.
You couldn't put it any better than that, Bucyrus. When public opinion and engineering become intertwined strange things have been known to happen. This will certainly be one of those cases. It isn't just about railroads; it is about our society and the politics of technological innovation.
John
Well, that's your opinion! It would be rather strange if there were no public discussion after an accident like this...no? And discussions almost always involve opinions. Railroads don't operate in a vacuum...they run through towns and the folks in those towns are voters who have a right and a responsibility to voice their concerns. That's how its supposed to work.
Regardless of how 'High Tech' and automatic and simple and easy to operate a system is implemented - there is one step that still falls to the operator - testing that the system did what it was intended to do.
No matter the man devised and built technological system - it will FAIL, a part will break, a uncharted decision path will be followed, a untested decision path will produce the wrong outcome.
The final step in all automated technologies is testing and observation to ensure that things are proceeding as they should. We have had the WMATA collisions because the automated features of their system were relied upon until manual override was implemented too late to avoid the collision.
In transportation employees are paid a good wage to DO THEIR JOB. Until the Canadian investigative bodies publish their final reports, it would appear that MM&A had a employee that 'short cut' his responsibilities in testing that his train was IN FACT secured, with his short cut (and it's reliance on 'automatic' technologies as they exist in current air brake technology) costing many lives and significant amounts of money. There is no technology that is fully FOOLPROOF, technology may raise the level of the fool required - but that high level fool will surface and defeat the technology.
I recall the writing of Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline. So few people default to, or are trained in, systems-thinking, and the worst of the bunch are the members of the public who are angry and outraged crtics of the system when the system's weaknesses are revealed.
Beware of the quick fix that backfires was one of Senge's archetypes in problem resolution and systems analysis if I recall correctly.
Crandell
Ulrich Well, that's your opinion! It would be rather strange if there were no public discussion after an accident like this...no? And discussions almost always involve opinions. Railroads don't operate in a vacuum...they run through towns and the folks in those towns are voters who have a right and a responsibility to voice their concerns. That's how its supposed to work.
Who are you responding to?
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
Almost 50 years ago in the pages of Trains - and his book, Integral Train Systems - John Kneiling recommended a braking system similar to what we now know as Electronically Controlled Pneumatic ("ECP") brakes, with a dual air line - including one that allowed parking the train on the "high air" pressure line - and sophisticated 'train-lined' monitoring and control systems, etc.
And, many times John wrote and argued that yes, the railroads are behind the curve on technological innovation. "You could look it up . . . "
- Paul North.
Ulrich asked, are railroads behind the curve on technological innovation? And I will answer yes and no.
It seems our old friend "Operating Ratio" is rearing its' ugly head again. It seems to boil down to two sides of an equation; does the new tech increase throughput(increase revenue), or cause a decrease in expenses, or at least have them stay the same.
Or, does it increase expenses, or decrease throughput due to some new regulation that hampers operation. I think railroads have always embraced the former, and only do the latter under protest.
I can think of two examples where the CPR embraced new technology because of the former. The first being Distributed Power. It was the single biggest improvement to freight hauling capability over the Rocky Mountains ever invented. It became so important to CP's operation, that as I understand it, at one point for about a year in the late '70's they were the only RR in North America using it. Others used it first, but at one point or another all of them had to suspend using it due to operational or reliability problems. But CP had no choice, they had contracts to fulfill and DP was the only way to do it. And now it is mainstream technology.
The second is Canadian, Wide, or Whisper Cabs. In the mid-eighties CP was about one contract away from having a serious engine crew problem. As the old heads who had come up under steam began to retire, younger men were no longer prepared to work under the same conditions their elders did. And in Canadian winters, conventional cab diesels had a serious problem. At -20 or -30° with a quartering head wind, that flat metal plate under the windshield ahead of the engineer transmitted cold into the cab like a restaurant grill transmits heat into hamburgers. CN did a wide cab first, but CP immediately realized if they didn't do something similar(SD40-2F) that their wage expense graph line was going to assume a vertical trajectory.
Under the right conditions RR's will embrace new technology.
Bruce
So shovel the coal, let this rattler roll.
"A Train is a Place Going Somewhere" CP Rail Public Timetable
"O. S. Irricana"
. . . __ . ______
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