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Comment by the_mitsuhiko | Hacker News Reader

Looks surprisingly laborious if this Twitter video is to trust: https://twitter.com/networkrail/status/1547986150723244032

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You’d think they could make a robot to paint the rails but then again, the rails on the things that vehicles are supposed to be riding on!

Perhaps you could make a device that rides on one rail while painting the other one. Flip it around and do the other side when you’ve done the first pass.

or just paint behind the robot

And use a pencil instead of inventing a pen that works in zero gravity.

The pencil introduced graphite dust into the air that caused electrical problems.

This is why astronauts use a pen. Sometimes the "cheap and simple" way has side effects that are more harmful than the original problem.

Oil pencils and wax pencils are a thing too.

They are, and the Soviets stopped using them because

- The paper peeled away is a fire hazard

- The oil and wax writing smudges and is a terrible way of writing

- The floating bits of paper from sharpening the pencils was a mess and since they float, got in people's faces.

Generally those are terrible ideas too, especially compared to a $100 for a pen. It's really not that much compared to every other cost.

What about mechanically advancing wax rods? The question isn’t whether the unit price of a super-pen is less than that of a consumer-waxpencil, but rather the R&D cost of the super-pen vs that of a supposed super-waxpencil.

NASA didn't spend any R&D on it as it was developed by a third party, so that point is moot as the answer is $0.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n...

And Russian space station (while they had one) was notorious for repeated fires.

Probably that approach to safety was cause for it.

How would this be any better then the video? It would also be much more expensive and complex then what they made.

The GP's video shows them using a spraying train car to do it much, much faster. It still has people riding on it and walking alongside, but sure looks more efficient.

Meanwhile, I notice that all the replies to the UK video are people complaining about the rail system reducing headcount and mocking the idea that this task could be automated.

For context, a bunch of UK rail staff have been striking lately and one of their demands is no efficiency improvements or compulsory redundances. (They also want a substantial pay increase of course.)

If you read anything about their demands, you will discover that from this year their contract is changing to require more hours at the same pay, so they are literally being given a paycut. In every other industry that would be illegal, but rail workers are expected to just suck it up and be grateful that they even still have a job, right? They protest compulsory redundancies because they know exactly how the British system works - a lot of people will be fired and the rest expected to just pick up the slack and work more hours, without any improvement like automation.

And among other things changes like not being paid for their commute when doing overtime(which was paid for previously), at the time when petrol has crossed £2/L around the country.

Are pay cuts illegal in UK? Wow, that’s insane.

Why is that insane?

Why is it insane? Maybe I should have clarified - your employer cannot cut your pay without a very good reason and you have to agree to it. In general it's a very tricky process legally, just like letting someone go - you need to make sure it's done correctly or you will lose in court. They cannot just say "from next month you will work extra 2 hours a week at same pay". Like....no? That's not in the employment contract we have signed, it binds both sides. And yet that's exactly what is happening to rail workers.

Your clarification makes more sense -- I also consider reduction in pay to be equivalent to firing, a piecewise one. I understand that it means that has to follow all rules about firing people, and that much I also find reasonable. At the same time, I find the rules about firing commonly found in Europe as wrongheaded, but that's not my complain above, which is about "illegality of pay reduction".

Do we count price increases on healthcare provided through an employer as a paycut? If so, everyone I know has been getting paycuts for years even ignoring inflation.

None of the media coverage I've seen or can find seems to mention this supposed paycut due to more hours at the same pay, including in really sympathetic outlets like the Guardian which describes their demands as being exactly what I claimed. In fact, the only change to terms I can find anywhere that even vaguely resembles that is that maybe some staff will no longer get the same generous overtime multiplier on Sunday, and that's from the literal World Socialist site which is vague enough in their wording that I suspect they might be playing sneaky word games again. (They're... not the most trustworthy source.)

Such automation will be banned in the UK. Painting things has to be done by hand. Union rules. No unauthorized mechanization! Spray cans are untested technology and are unsafe. Spray paint is worse for the environment and workers health. Besides, painting by hand is better for morale.

Painting will obviously have to happen at night (double pay), and is risky work (double pay again). Oh, and we can't do more than 3 hour shifts because it involves bending down. And we'll be needing a minimum crew of 8 - 1 painter, 1 safety expert, 1 signalling expert, 1 electrics expert, 1 spotter, 1 paint quality expert, a foreman to lead the team, and a union rep to check everything is done according to the book. Oh, and wherever the work is being done more than 15 minutes from a toilet, we'll need a mobile toilet booked and installed, as well as a break room. If any of those people are missing or late, we'll cancel the work and retry in 3 months.

Railroad deaths and injuries per capita are much lower than in the USA. I'd say the unions and RAIB have done a pretty good job at improving safety standards.

Ah, but railroad workers in the US are also part of a union/unions, with arguably even more rules and regulations and very averse to technological advances, since it reduces the need for manual labor. So yeah USA would have more deaths because everything is manual and archaic, whereas in the UK you have things like the DLR, it could never happen in the US.

The DLR is only automated because it's brand new. It replaced nobodies job. And even that was a real fight to get and caused lots of strikes.

Of course, but try to add an automated line to the new york subway.

That would free the people to do the job of "conductor", "nanny", security, and cleaner to make that mess a less icky experience. Morale boost!

TfL brought level 2 GoA to a few Tube lines. In the US newer subway systems are already at that level. DLR is GoA 3, and a few smaller lines in the US (e.g. Las Vegas Monorail, Miami's thing, pretty much all airport people movers) are Level 4.

Yes, newer ones don’t have the same problem, since they are not held back by the rules of a union. Sadly those are few and far between, and I haven’t heard of a new railroad line since the yet to be finished CHSR, though can’t blame that one on the unions.

Dude. What the fuck are you on about?

BART and Muni are both union shops. I don't know if SMART is but it postdates the HSR proposals.

As someone who lived through Muni's transition to SelTrac (the system that underpins DLR and I think some of the Tube lines) I can say the union was not the problem. The technology was unreliable and eventually abandoned by Alcatel/Thales. GoA 4 stuff is only viable along small, low ridership stretches of track. If you knock the level of automation down a peg or two it's a lot easier to scale up to busier/larger systems.

This has been downvoted, but in my experience of 10 years of working in the UK rail industry, this is pretty much spot on.

> we'll be needing a minimum crew of 8 - 1 painter, 1 safety expert, 1 signalling expert, 1 electrics expert, 1 spotter, 1 paint quality expert, a foreman to lead the team, and a union rep to check everything is done according to the book.

Hah! Typical free market libertarian approach that cuts corners. You can't just go out and start painting stuff matey! What about the viability study? Someone needs to build a model of the processes, and conduct a pilot time and motion study. People won't just accept white rails without consultation. Where's the perception management and transformation campaign to make sure the new white theme is on message and brand aligned for Railtrack? You'll have to add at least 1 lawyer, 1 community liaison officer, 2 PR people, an advertising account executive...

> we'll need a mobile toilet booked and installed

Toilet? Pfff. You can't just go out and stick up a toilet....

while this isn't without merit, I consistently see that individual workers are much more concious of quality of their work and safety/reliability of the end user than the management is.

We've had many industrial accidents, from Bhopal's disaster to Boeing Max, thousands of people died, and all of them were caused by management meddling where they shouldn't. none of them were caused by unions

Does not even matter that majority of the rail in the UK does not operate at night.

For all you doubters, this is how it works. And talking of breaks, if a manager says anything to the lads, even non-work related, they're allowed to start their break again.

It's even spraying in front of the train car and then apparently rolling right over it without much trouble (although I note some white paint on the wheels).

I don't think anyone is expecting the paint to stick to the rolling surface of the rail for very long, but that (on a track with regular usage) gets polished by the passing trains, so it's reflective anyway...

Of course that is not a problem.

What needs to be painted is the sides of the rail, the top - even if painted in the process - will return to lucid metal as soon as the next few trains pass on them.

Usually small trucks (Unimogs adapted to rail use) or small convoys are used, see:

https://scalaenne.wordpress.com/2016/07/30/binari-bianchi/

Painting vehicle and robot likely cost pretty much the same. And with vehicle you don't really need to think about all of the nitty gritty details of autonomous operations or regulations.

This is an easy problem to solve. You just have the paint mechanism at the back of the vehicle so it paints after the wheels have moved over the track. Kind of like the reverse of the plough at the front of the train that some networks (not U.K.) have to clear the track before the wheels pass over it.

Do it from the back end while it moves forward?

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