Why are railroads waiting to install safety technology? | Hacker News Reader

Why are railroads waiting to install safety technology?

latimes.com

12 pointsanigbrowl8 comments

Automatic breaking system are used in other countries for decades now, so the problem is political, not technical.

Not merely decades, the GWR had automatic stop from 1906.

One of my uncles was an engine driver in the UK, he told me that on the Great Western Railway and its successor British Rail (at least on the GWR lines and locos) that even on steam trains it was not possible to drive through a stop signal without holding on to a lever to defeat the trip that was connected to the signal. It worked using a lever that poked up in the middle of the track to engage a lever on the locomotive that would disconnect the vacuum line on the brakes thus stopping the train. On diesels it would literally blow fuses that stopped the motor and engage the fail safe brakes. See Wikipedia:

An "automatic train control" system was introduced from 1906 which was a safety system that applied a train's brakes if it passed a danger signal.[89]

That was over a hundred years ago, yet a few years ago in the newly re-privatised UK railway system we had a serious collision where one train ran a stop signal because there was no such system in place.

ATP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_protection) is present on some Great Western trains, and TWPS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_Protection_%26_Warning_Sy...) is present on some others. There is also AWS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_warning_system_(railw...). Looking through the list of rail accidents in the UK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_accidents_in_the_U...), the last one caused by a signal passed at danger was the Ladbroke Grove accident in 1999 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladbroke_Grove_rail_crash).

There are still regular incidents though, such as the one at Wootton Bassett recently (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Wootton_Bassett_SPAD_incid...).

you just hold the lever with one hand and use the smartphone with the other?

Seems like a tablet with GPS and railroad maps, attached to a loud buzzer would be a far easier/cheaper solution to this problem.

The answer is simple : it cost money.

Well in particular it cost money due to false positives.

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