Comment by floatrock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by floatrock | Hacker News Reader

The Atlantic did a great longform piece last year all about NYC's (also past-useful-life) signaling infrastructure by asking a simple question: why is it so hard to build a train arrival countdown clock?

They go into a lot of detail on how the past-useful-live infrastructure works, modern replacement technologies, and even a race between infrastructure-giant Siemans and a bunch of hackers kludging together a countdown clock:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-do...

A more interesting read than this blog post.

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On a different note, these "they don't make these anymore" problems make me wonder if maybe we should be pushing government to look for open-source hardware for these types of infrastructure work.

When you have equipment lifetimes of (officially) 35 years (realistically up to 100 years), can you really rely on the same Sieman's division to still be in business supporting it? In this Boston story, I wonder how much of their repair workshop is reverse-engineering some hardware whos blueprints long ago decayed in some rusting factory.

Given the right open-source hardware, could you make "they don't make these anymore" obsolete because the technology has become accessible enough that you could build it yourself? (And in the process employing "New Economy" type high-tech jobs). More importantly, should a public entity push for making it's infrastructure publicly accessible? (Pragmatically, could you find someone to build it under those terms?)

For most of the (new) equipment procurement the MBTA does now, they actually own the specifications for the equipment, which means that if they want to make more, they put out an RFP for companies to manufacture new equipment based on their spec. The downside to this is that the T likes to over-customize their orders, which drives costs up compared to buying more standard "off-the-shelf" equipment, and if no responses to the RFP come back, they have to relax some of the requirements and put it out again.

While its true that they own the specification, in practice the large company (i.e. Siemens in this example) is the only one capable of producing the product at a non-prohibitive rate.

I suspect what they'll find when they finally rip out all this equipment is that the new system will be unrepairable without huge long term contracts with the original vendor.

These old mechanical systems have their own problems, but repairability is not one of them. Almost any competent machining shop could duplicate one of the switches in the article.

Is owning the specification really the same thing as owning the hardware source? Why is it that you need the long-term vendor contracts? If you go beyond the spec and make all the hardware control boards, software, etc. open, could you lower that cost?

Boston has one unique feature that makes public-ish ownership of specifications and the hardware running more plausible than other cities... it has a large number of technically-sophisticated potential stewards for such a program who aren't going anywhere: all the colleges and universities.

MIT and Harvard are something like the largest land owners in cambridge and boston... they're not leaving anytime soon, and ideally they have an interest in maintaining relationships with their community. They're invested in the area, and as academic institutions, inclined to support open source initiatives like this (how many of you use the MIT keyserver for your PGP keys?) Imagine a "civic service" initiative where the area universities are stewards of the open source implementation for the city's infrastructure.

Not at all saying you want the T to run on overworked grad student code -- outsource that in a professional RFP -- but if the concern is that technical stewardship might be out of the realm of a municipal infrastructure agency, Boston's academic population could make for an interesting partnership.

Hairbrained stream-of-consciousness idea, but hey, that's what internet forums are for ; )

As the first example of the money involved in railway signalling, in 2012 "Siemens has entered into an agreement to acquire Invensys Rail, the rail automation business of Invensys for approximately €2.2 billion"

That's presumably not the kind of operation that can be run in someone's spare time, and exactly the kind of work that graduates from these universities are training towards, and would expect to be well-paid to do.

> if the concern is that technical stewardship might be out of the realm of a municipal infrastructure agency

...then they really must employ someone to do that work. Except perhaps for the tunnels, the signalling system is their most important asset.

That particular problem is easily solved by providing all needed documentation as part of the development contract. I'm a big fan of OSS & OSH, but it doesn't add value in this case.

I'm pretty sure the problem isn't knowing how the devices work, it's the limitations of the 100 year-old technology in the face of modern expectations.

The Atlantic article was on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10566776

102 points by jsomers 114 days ago | 21 comments

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