Chatsworth, Three Years Later

My apologies to the net if I have poopooed it. Let me rephrase, why have none of the newspaper reports or internet items I've read that mention phone records that say he got texts also say that he sent texts that pertain to suicide?
If you have read something that indicates he was committing suicide can you please give a citation so maybe the rest of us can follow the same thread you have?

jb9152 wrote:…
Now, add PTC. PTC, of necessity, must assume that an inexperienced engineer is at the controls, that the rails are coated with a slick slime that reduces adhesion significantly, and that the brakes are not working at 100% efficiency when it calculates where braking needs to start to get the train down from 70 to 30. That's PTC's enforcement point, where the onboard system will take over and slow the train if the engineer fails to do so. Because you've assumed worst case conditions, you're already backing off from the "engineer's best judgment" braking point by a fairly significant distance.…

hello, random unknowing peon here. how exactly is this a necessity?? that's a poorly-designed system, not a necessity. a well-designed system should know very well about what kind of train it's controlling, what its current braking efficiency is, and what the conditions of the rails are. if that's not the case, well, that's a crappy system, and doesn't really say anything about PTC as a whole.

it would be like having an ABS system that's the same on all cars and doesn't take into account how fast the car is going or its weight or anything and saying "oh, ABS sucks! of course people can pump the brake better than this stupid machine!"

lensovet wrote:

jb9152 wrote:…
Now, add PTC. PTC, of necessity, must assume that an inexperienced engineer is at the controls, that the rails are coated with a slick slime that reduces adhesion significantly, and that the brakes are not working at 100% efficiency when it calculates where braking needs to start to get the train down from 70 to 30. That's PTC's enforcement point, where the onboard system will take over and slow the train if the engineer fails to do so. Because you've assumed worst case conditions, you're already backing off from the "engineer's best judgment" braking point by a fairly significant distance.…

hello, random unknowing peon here. how exactly is this a necessity?? that's a poorly-designed system, not a necessity. a well-designed system should know very well about what kind of train it's controlling, what its current braking efficiency is, and what the conditions of the rails are. if that's not the case, well, that's a crappy system, and doesn't really say anything about PTC as a whole.

it would be like having an ABS system that's the same on all cars and doesn't take into account how fast the car is going or its weight or anything and saying "oh, ABS sucks! of course people can pump the brake better than this stupid machine!"

Well that was how the PTC pilot program in NJ on the NJT Pascack Valley Line was set up. Worst case scenario braking curves. Remember, the railroad always has to take the safest course. A simple misidentification of a train by a "smart" system could mean a totally wrong braking curve for the train and its equipment and could confuse a 10 boxcar, all empty local train with 1 loco with a 6 loco distributed power, 120 car loaded coal train. That WOULD lead to exactly the type of accident that the system is trying to prevent.

The system is being rushed to implement by a congressionally mandated deadline - you think a well designed, intelligent (even more expensive) system is going to be built? Or just the minimum to get by the federal laws?

time after time the auto industry has had no problem with this. sure, they throw up a hissy fit every time a new safety/emissions regulation is passed, but they manage to meet it without problems. seatbelts, airbags, TPMS, catalytic converters, emissions warranties, etc, etc. i don't understand why everyone in the railroad industry thinks that they are somehow special.

Are you sure the auto industry has met these safety-emissions mandates without ANY problems? At the least I'd figure they help increase the automobile's price, which could reduce car sales overall.
Another example, emissions standards have led to catalytic converters, which sometimes get stolen. Although it's then the consumer's immediate problem and maybe not the auto industry's problem, it's still a problem.
Catalytic converters also get very hot. I thought litter, particularly plastic trash bags blowing around, were the most likely things they'd ignite.
http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/pub/fireplan ... pdf122.pdf
June 12, 1997

Ongoing incidents have been reported involving individuals driving onto dry grass and immediately causing a fire. This is due to the exhaust system coming into contact with the dry grass. However, nonconverter equipped vehicles have also been known to cause fires when driven onto dry vegetation and making direct contact with the exhaust system. Fires caused by converter equipped vehicles have occurred instantaneously once the vehicle has come to a stop on dry grass. In several cases, occupants have exited the vehicle with flames appearing from underneath because the vegetation was already on fire. Whereas, when occupants exited a non-converter equipped vehicle, the smell of smoldering grass was often an
indicator that a fire was about to occur. This would often give the occupants time to move the vehicle to a safe parking location and avoid a fire.
Catalytic converter melt down caused by a malfunction within the electronic ignition system is a source of ignition no one anticipated. This malfunction allows raw fuel to go directly into the exhaust system, with the converter becoming a combustion chamber. The converter then melts down and emits hot pieces from the tail pipe. It is estimated the converter melts at around 2400 to 2800 degrees F. It is
apparent that age and maintenance of a vehicle have nothing to do with the malfunction. The malfunction is in the electronic ignition system, for which there are no tests to determine possible failure. A cause of electronic ignition malfunction is low voltage in the system. This can be due to a dead or near-dead battery or other problems within the electrical system.

Patrick Boylan wrote:My apologies to the net if I have poopooed it. Let me rephrase, why have none of the newspaper reports or internet items I've read that mention phone records that say he got texts also say that he sent texts that pertain to suicide?
If you have read something that indicates he was committing suicide can you please give a citation so maybe the rest of us can follow the same thread you have?

Patrick, I watched entire NTSB hearings on internet and at time entire cellphone log was posted on NTSB site, including time and messages and conversations (transcripts) and Text messages word for word.
no conclusion was made towards suicide but it was hinted by outsiders.

lensovet wrote:time after time the auto industry has had no problem with this. sure, they throw up a hissy fit every time a new safety/emissions regulation is passed, but they manage to meet it without problems. seatbelts, airbags, TPMS, catalytic converters, emissions warranties, etc, etc. i don't understand why everyone in the railroad industry thinks that they are somehow special.

this really isn't a valid comparison - I mean those are modifications on cars and engines, and if you want to use that comparison, the railroad industry IS doing the same thing, with compliance with new EPA regulations and also FRA crash worthiness regulations which are for the locomotives and cab cars and passenger cars.

This would be more on the level of suddenly having to install all new traffic lights and automatic crash avoidance features in automobiles in a handful of years. Sure they have been working on those smart expressways with the magnets and the cars that drive themselves real close together for years. Well, imagine an act of congress making that mandatory in 5 years on all interstates and roads and in all cars, both new and existing automobiles. Thats more on the level of what PTC is and the challenge that the railroads face. Of course there are umpteen more miles of roads in the US and umpteen more cars as well, but thats the same kinda thing.

Patrick Boylan wrote:Are you sure the auto industry has met these safety-emissions mandates without ANY problems? At the least I'd figure they help increase the automobile's price, which could reduce car sales overall.
…

you could figure or instead you could actually check something. car prices adjusted for wages have actually gone down in the past two decades. see for yourself: http://www.comerica.com/Comerica_Conten ... Q22008.pdf

Jtgshu wrote:

lensovet wrote:time after time the auto industry has had no problem with this. sure, they throw up a hissy fit every time a new safety/emissions regulation is passed, but they manage to meet it without problems. seatbelts, airbags, TPMS, catalytic converters, emissions warranties, etc, etc. i don't understand why everyone in the railroad industry thinks that they are somehow special.

this really isn't a valid comparison - I mean those are modifications on cars and engines, and if you want to use that comparison, the railroad industry IS doing the same thing, with compliance with new EPA regulations and also FRA crash worthiness regulations which are for the locomotives and cab cars and passenger cars.

This would be more on the level of suddenly having to install all new traffic lights and automatic crash avoidance features in automobiles in a handful of years. Sure they have been working on those smart expressways with the magnets and the cars that drive themselves real close together for years. Well, imagine an act of congress making that mandatory in 5 years on all interstates and roads and in all cars, both new and existing automobiles. Thats more on the level of what PTC is and the challenge that the railroads face. Of course there are umpteen more miles of roads in the US and umpteen more cars as well, but thats the same kinda thing.

perhaps that's fair, but at the same time, the magnet tech you talk about is only a few decades old and hasn't gone anywhere not because of complexity but because no one has really figured out how to integrate it into the current road network without forcing everyone to buy a new car. PTC precursors, on the other hand, are approaching their 70th birthdays, and current locomotives do not need to be replaced to make them compatible with newly-installed PTC systems. furthermore, one could argue that the cost vs. benefit ratio is much higher on rail, where preventing a single accident can save hundreds of lives, while preventing a single auto accident would save just one or two lives.

lensovet wrote:

jb9152 wrote:…
Now, add PTC. PTC, of necessity, must assume that an inexperienced engineer is at the controls, that the rails are coated with a slick slime that reduces adhesion significantly, and that the brakes are not working at 100% efficiency when it calculates where braking needs to start to get the train down from 70 to 30. That's PTC's enforcement point, where the onboard system will take over and slow the train if the engineer fails to do so. Because you've assumed worst case conditions, you're already backing off from the "engineer's best judgment" braking point by a fairly significant distance.…

hello, random unknowing peon here. how exactly is this a necessity?? that's a poorly-designed system, not a necessity. a well-designed system should know very well about what kind of train it's controlling, what its current braking efficiency is, and what the conditions of the rails are. if that's not the case, well, that's a crappy system, and doesn't really say anything about PTC as a whole.

it would be like having an ABS system that's the same on all cars and doesn't take into account how fast the car is going or its weight or anything and saying "oh, ABS sucks! of course people can pump the brake better than this stupid machine!"

Not a good comparison, len. Automobile ABS is not constantly calculating the distance to stop based on your current speed, trajectory, acceleration, upcoming hills/valleys/curves, traffic signals, and so forth. It's a relatively "dumb" system that knows a few things about the car. It is not trying to predict where the car will be in one second, let alone minutes and miles ahead.

PTC, on the other hand, is constantly calculating distance to stop, distance to slow for the next speed restriction, and so forth. It has no way of knowing what the condition of the rail is 3000 feet in advance, let alone right under it (although there is an interesting idea regarding the use of chemical analysis of the rail to "predict" how slippery it might be, but it's not even close to the testing phase, let alone implementation...right now, it's just an interesting idea). It has no idea whether the engineer is a relative newbie, a seasoned vet, or even just a seasoned vet having a bad day. It has no idea how well the brakes are working because there's not enough information to do so, or any way of collecting and analyzing it (although, again, there is some interesting work going on right now to determine whether it would be possible for PTC to "learn" how a given train is operating - but it's still theoretical, and would not be effective until the train ran for some time so PTC could "learn" - meaning that for the first X miles of a run, the train would be less accurate). Each of these methods to make PTC 'smarter', of course, involve yet more subsystems laid on top of the others....meaning more chances for a subsystem to fail and bring the whole thing to a screeching halt.

The safety margins built into PTC are simply extensions of the way that signal systems are currently designed. Uncertainty is captured by extending stopping distances (which is accomplished by building in some percentage of "fudge factor"), even in basic ABS wayside signal-only systems.

lensovet wrote:

Jtgshu wrote:

lensovet wrote:time after time the auto industry has had no problem with this. sure, they throw up a hissy fit every time a new safety/emissions regulation is passed, but they manage to meet it without problems. seatbelts, airbags, TPMS, catalytic converters, emissions warranties, etc, etc. i don't understand why everyone in the railroad industry thinks that they are somehow special.

this really isn't a valid comparison - I mean those are modifications on cars and engines, and if you want to use that comparison, the railroad industry IS doing the same thing, with compliance with new EPA regulations and also FRA crash worthiness regulations which are for the locomotives and cab cars and passenger cars.

This would be more on the level of suddenly having to install all new traffic lights and automatic crash avoidance features in automobiles in a handful of years. Sure they have been working on those smart expressways with the magnets and the cars that drive themselves real close together for years. Well, imagine an act of congress making that mandatory in 5 years on all interstates and roads and in all cars, both new and existing automobiles. Thats more on the level of what PTC is and the challenge that the railroads face. Of course there are umpteen more miles of roads in the US and umpteen more cars as well, but thats the same kinda thing.

perhaps that's fair, but at the same time, the magnet tech you talk about is only a few decades old and hasn't gone anywhere not because of complexity but because no one has really figured out how to integrate it into the current road network without forcing everyone to buy a new car. PTC precursors, on the other hand, are approaching their 70th birthdays, and current locomotives do not need to be replaced to make them compatible with newly-installed PTC systems. furthermore, one could argue that the cost vs. benefit ratio is much higher on rail, where preventing a single accident can save hundreds of lives, while preventing a single auto accident would save just one or two lives.

You are correct in that the magnet technology is "only a few decades old" but which has a bigger market? Hundreds of millions of passenger cars, or 20-30 thousand locomotives? Id think the hundreds of millions of cars.....and it still hasn't been developed yet - the cost savings of condensed traffic flow like that would save literally hundreds of billions of dollars because there would be less need for more highways and expansions of existing highways, building/rebuilding of bridges, etc. There are lots of carrots to make that work, and yet it "still isn't ready for prime time" - same with PTC, just that PTC is getting forced by the gov't, the smart highways aren't. Also how old something is or how fresh or mature the technology is really doesn't mean squat. A good example of that is electric cars and hybrid cars.....all this "new" technology is basically 19th century technology "freshened up" with new bells and whistles and most important and notable,battery improvements. Thats progress right? What about the "lost century" of this type of vehicle development.....why did it take GM like 60 years to make a hybrid car? They were making them in LaGrange, ILL in mass since the 1930s....just really really really big "cars" that ran on a rail road instead of a road road......

I agree with you in the sense that sometimes government has to force an industry to act and improve, and the automobile industry in the last 30-40 years is a perfect example. But this is different (IMO). there are some very basic and time tested methods and ways of railroading and its one industry that sort of bucks the trend of "newer is always better" - sometimes the technology that works the best is already existing. Can it be improved? Of course, but the same basic premise is there - air brakes, the coupler, hell, even the steel wheel on rails. But there has to be an "accepted risk". Even with all the newest technology in couplers, there are still pull aparts. Even with all the improvements in air brakes, there are still "kickers" - even with all the improvements in bearings, there are still hotboxes and seized bearings/axles. Its never going to be 100 percent. PTC seems to try to make things 100 percent and its being "sold" that way, which anyone actually in the industry (and not a talking head in Washington) knows is a crock. Its designed by humans, so its going to have faults. We can minimize the faults to the best of our ability, but they are still going to be there, and will rear their ugly head at some point, some time. Also can't forget about the learning curve of new technology as well.....

Yes, there will still be accidents after PTC is installed nationwide and on every piece of equipment to be modified. And then the question will be asked "well how did this happen?" "It shouldn't have happened" they will call congressional hearings - people will wonder where the billions of dollars went that were supposed to prevent this!!! Sure sounds familiar, doesn't it?

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lensovet wrote:it would be like having an ABS system that's the same on all cars and doesn't take into account how fast the car is going or its weight or anything and saying "oh, ABS sucks! of course people can pump the brake better than this stupid machine!"

Also - this occurred to me as I gave it a bit more thought. ABS is not designed to guarantee a stop at a definite point in all conditions. It's a safety system that ensures that brakes don't lock up in a "panic stop" situation, at its core. It doesn't "think" or "analyze", per se. It simply helps the human operator not to brake his vehicle into an uncontrollable skid. Built into what it "knows" is the make and model of the car, its weight, and its basic performance characteristics. But that's about it.

PTC, on the other hand, has to be able to bring a train to a dead stop at a very specific point (or at least within some manageable, acceptable error band). It has to be calculating, on a second by second basis, the position, trajectory, and speed of the train and to be comparing that against what's in its physical characteristics database (which will provide permanent speed restriction locations, lengths, and speeds), its database of temporary speed restrictions (for temporary speed restrictions, lengths, and speeds...plus 'on the fly' restrictions that come up during the day as MoW requests track and time, foul time, etc.), and the states of all of the signal appliances in the vicinity (signal aspects, switch positions, and so forth). It has to do this for a trainset that might have different performance characteristics from day to day (especially in the case of freight trains), different engineers, and a different set of track conditions - dry, wet, high adhesion, low adhesion. There are certain things that the PTC system can "know" with accuracy, and others that it only "knows" to some lesser degree of accuracy. As Donald Rumsfeld once said, "There are known knowns;....known unknowns;.....[and] unknown unknowns." It's those known and unknown unknowns that force on-board PTC systems to add in "fudge factor" to their second by second stopping and reducing distance analysis.

This is why ABS is not an apt comparison, and also why there is some amount of safety margin built into PTC's calculations...which causes PTC, deployed as a simple safety overlay to existing train control systems, to be a drain on capacity.

jb9152 wrote:

lensovet wrote:it would be like having an ABS system that's the same on all cars and doesn't take into account how fast the car is going or its weight or anything and saying "oh, ABS sucks! of course people can pump the brake better than this stupid machine!"

Also - this occurred to me as I gave it a bit more thought. ABS is not designed to guarantee a stop at a definite point in all conditions. It's a safety system that ensures that brakes don't lock up in a "panic stop" situation, at its core. It doesn't "think" or "analyze", per se. It simply helps the human operator not to brake his vehicle into an uncontrollable skid. Built into what it "knows" is the make and model of the car, its weight, and its basic performance characteristics. But that's about it.

...

This is why ABS is not an apt comparison, and also why there is some amount of safety margin built into PTC's calculations...which causes PTC, deployed as a simple safety overlay to existing train control systems, to be a drain on capacity.

ABS does not "know" anything about the make model weight or anything else. All it does is monitor wheel RPM when the brakes are applied and does not let that drop to zero abruptly. End of system.

leemell wrote:

jb9152 wrote:

lensovet wrote:it would be like having an ABS system that's the same on all cars and doesn't take into account how fast the car is going or its weight or anything and saying "oh, ABS sucks! of course people can pump the brake better than this stupid machine!"

Also - this occurred to me as I gave it a bit more thought. ABS is not designed to guarantee a stop at a definite point in all conditions. It's a safety system that ensures that brakes don't lock up in a "panic stop" situation, at its core. It doesn't "think" or "analyze", per se. It simply helps the human operator not to brake his vehicle into an uncontrollable skid. Built into what it "knows" is the make and model of the car, its weight, and its basic performance characteristics. But that's about it.

...

This is why ABS is not an apt comparison, and also why there is some amount of safety margin built into PTC's calculations...which causes PTC, deployed as a simple safety overlay to existing train control systems, to be a drain on capacity.

ABS does not "know" anything about the make model weight or anything else. All it does is monitor wheel RPM when the brakes are applied and does not let that drop to zero abruptly. End of system.

OK, then it's even dumber than I suggested. Shows my level of automotive technology knowledge. Thanks for the clarification.

That said, my point is even stronger. ABS is obviously a quite "dumb" system, assuming leemell has accurately described it. There is absolutely no comparison to PTC's complexity, safety-critical mission, and data needs.

I could edit my original post, but I'll leave it up as a testament to why you should never listen to me if I'm recommending a particular make and model of car. But everything I said about PTC stands...and is strengthened, actually.