will the EMP item have any effect on railroad equipment or are they all shielded from any attack ? on coast to coast am speaker said that any devices on electric power grids will be mode meltdown. since railroads are a national security they should be protected right??
* The majority of the on-board avionics were based on vacuum-tube technology, not solid-state electronics. Seemingly obsolete, vacuum tubes were actually more tolerant of temperature extremes, thereby removing the need for providing complex environmental controls inside the avionics bays. In addition, the vacuum tubes were easy to replace in remote northern airfields where sophisticated transistor parts may not have been readily available. As with most Soviet aircraft, the MiG-25 was designed to be as rugged as possible. Also, the use of vacuum tubes makes the aircraft’s systems more resistant to an electromagnetic pulse, for example after a nuclear blast.
http://www.globalaircraft.org/planes/mig-25_foxbat.pl
At first, the press laughed at Ivan’s radiola avionics. Then, EMP sank into the minds of Western military electronics designers.
Shielding of military electronics in now a must. Shielding railroad electronics would undoubtedly be extremely expensive.
We certainly didn’t specify it in the Conrail new locomotive specs.
http://electro-magneticpulse.com/files/Critical%20National%20Infrastructures%20Report%202008-04.pdf
Check pages 105-111.
EMP = ElectroMagnetic Pulse, almost always a by-product of a nuclear explosion.
Is there a significant difference between the effects of a nearby lightning strike, and an EMP, when it comes to protecting lineside equipment, such as signal boxes ?
This is one problem that a steam locomotive is totally immune from ! [swg] (Photo of a “Y2K Compliant” sign on the back of a Shay in Trains back then.)
- Paul North.
If a railroad’s electronics have been fried by an EMP, I would think that they would have more important issues to worry about.
I’d like to see the NON-Explosive device that could set up am EMP of that sort…[:S]
You just need the “Pinch” from Ocean’s Eleven or the “Sword of Damcles” weapon from Escape From L.A. for on location EMP blasts. While that weapon my be a little too much science-fiction at the time, pinches are a real-life occurance of an electromagnetic pulse either naturally with lightning strike and solar flares or by a real man-made device.
I’m with CSSHEGEWISCH. I don’t give even a casual thought to what would happen if the railroad was impacted by an EMP. I also don’t worry about it being hit by an asteroid, or a particle beam weapon fired by an alien invader. I only worry about things that are really apt to happen.
What is the EMP power of Solar Flares - Several years ago a solar flare knocked the satellite used by a major pager company (remember when pagers were cutting edge technology). While that flare was sufficient to knock out anything in the power grid, can there be solar flares that have sufficient power to do it?
“EMP” and the aftereffects of a major solar flare work on two very different timescales. The key word in EMP is “Pulse”, where the rise times are in the sub-microsecond range. The classic method of producing one is by setting off a nuke 200 to 500 miles above the Earth’s surface, with the radiation causing a very rapid increase in ionization of the ionosphere and fairly rapid de-ionization of the ionosphere. Solar flares wreck their havoc via the charged particles interacting with the earth’s magnetosphere which causes geomagnetic disturbances, typically generating much lower voltages than an EMP, but much longer lasting currents. The charged particle flux is also what creates problems with satellites, but note that is more of a problem with the birds orbiting above the Van Allen belts (e.g. geo-synchronous).
There is little direct effect to people on the ground from detonating a nuke in space. Since the detonation occurs in a vacuum, there is no way for the blast to propagate. Ionizing radiation is not an issue as the atmosphere is equivalent to about 15 feet of concrete as far as shielding. The main worry is what the resulting EMP would do to unprotected electronics and electrical gear.
I would imagine that first generation diesel locomotives would be relatively unaffected by the EMP. Microprocessor equipped locomotives would be much more vulnerable.
A “Carrington event” solar flare could result in major damage to electrified railroads, but would have little impact on even the most modern diesel locomotives. Signal systems would be affected and the rails might have hundreds to thousands of amps of induced current flowing in them.
- Erik
I’m qualified to repair EMP hardened avionics systems, and I will assure you, it has the most pain in the ass procedures to follow.
Nuclear capable bombers? Sure. A railroad system, the costs will not outweigh the slim chance.
Adrianspeeder
Is it any worse than TEMPEST?? Realizing that EMP hardening requires dealing with much higher voltages - also TEMEST is for keeping EM on the inside from getting out and EMP hardening is for keeping EM from the outside from getting in.
Easiest way to shield locomotives is to stick 'em in a tunnel, the tunnel makes for a lossy waveguide.
- Erik
Americans spend more time worrying about everything that we have ever considered doing to other countries than anyone else in the world. If you are worried about someone detonating a nuclear device in orbit over the USA you need to get a life. We are bankrupting our country out of fear. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars harassing Americans who are just trying to travel around the country because we are terrified by a small band of primitives half way around the world. We spend trillions of dollars supporting a military that costs more that the next 10 largest militaries combined. What are we afraid of? Our entire federal government has the same mentality as those idiotic doomsday preppers that you can see on TV. You know the ones. They have a bunker in or under their house stocked with a couple of years worth of canned goods, water, 10,000 rounds of ammunition for their dozens of guns. It is a mental illness. I really hope that the paranoia never spreads to our railroads.
FWIW, and EMP attack would be the most reliable way for a nation with a very limited number of nukes and unreliable (read wildly inaccurate) ballistic missiles to attack and cause significant infrastructure damage to an industrialized country. The likelihood of such an attack is not high enough that we need to spend trillions of dollars on making our infrastructure invulnerable, but not so low that we can’t afford to make no preparations whatsoever. For the RR’s, preparations would be having a supply of spares of sensitive control electronics as opposed to EMP hardening said electronics. In some ways, preparing for EMP isn’t that much different than preparing for a lightning strike.
In regards to RR’s and security, my biggest concern is the implementation of Positive Train Control with respect to protection against hacking.
- Erik
Just wait until the zombie apocalypse… then they’ll have the last laugh.
Excuse me, I have to go sharpen my axe again.
Phoebe,
I grew up in a time where we were shown where the fallout shelters were in downtown and on base, we practiced the “Tuck and duck and don’t look at the flash” in grade school, and luckily I got to watch the Berlin wall come back down.
You would be amazed how serious we were about all of that, even though it would have made little difference.
Don’t discredit the bunker folks to much; the old USSR is missing a lot of hardware and nuclear fuel, and the world is full of extremist, just look to the Middle East.
Until 9/11, would it have occurred to the general public that a bunch of college age religious fanatics would, and could hijack four airliners and succeed in crashing two them into the World Trade Center?
An intentionally “dirty” air blast is not beyond these fanatics reach.
Do you mean by spoofing GPS signals to make the train control system believe it is in a different location than where it really is? It is my understanding that the system also uses an odometer and has a map of the route it is to run. If it detected a WIU for an interlocking in a location where it wasn’t expecting one, I am sure there would be a fail safe to stop the train. Certainly I would be more concerned about GPS spoofing an Airliner navigation system or Air Traffic Control system rather than PTC. So any attempt by a terrorist to deceive a PTC system would have to be a very cunning and clever attack indeed.
At least some of the PTC systems that have been discussed use a central computer and involve communication between said computer and the trains. Recent stories about security holes in SCADA systems do leave me a bit leery about the implementation of PTC, though it is possible that the developers do know what they are doing with respect to security.
I’d also wonder if the PTC software had some sanity checks on the reported GPS position as well. Do keep in mind that PTC has to operate in situations where there is no or very poor GPS coverage (e.g tunnels).
- Erik