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Forum sheds light on railroads’ PTC progress
Fact #1: Hersman is a pseudo-intellectual government drone. She can dictate this stuff like a good little peon working for the big dictator. But she can’t actually do any of it. Nor can she explain PTC. Let alone comprehend how it should work. The best she can do is spit out a bunch of junk in an attempt to make herself sound intelligent.
If the freight railroads were smart about this, they would have a private conference in an undisclosed location and come up with a plan to make the NTSB look just like the emperor with no clothes. Agree to build almost absolutely nothing and call it PTC. These pseudo-intellectual government types would probably be 100% fooled by a circuit board with a few diodes, capacitors, IC chips, and a few blinking pretty colored LED’s. And what will it do? Blinking and flashing and blinking and flashing. In sequence, of course. If it gets out of sequence? Who cares? It doesn’t do anything but keep the pseudo-intellectuals happy.
The Interstate Commerce clause in the Constitution gives government the power to make regular and normalize commerce, and get rid of burdensome regulations. Not to muck it up.
Having personally spoken to several of the technical advisors to the NTSB, FRA, and AAR, I can assure you that the NTSB stands no chance whatsoever of being fooled by some ruse in the fashion suggested by Mr. Guse.
The NTSB–or at least their rank and file, which is anyone underneath the Chairman and board–is awkwardly caught between a rock and a hard place, between the railroads and the Congress that passed the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008. If any ire is to be had, raise it with the Congress that thinks it can make anything happen just by passing a law to that effect.
Can a system like this be far behind for trucks, cars and ships? Fatal train accidents take place occasionally, fatal auto accidents occur daily. Many aircraft already employ a Traffic Collision Avoidance System and the vision of next generation Air Traffic Control is on the drawing board. The overarching weak link in air safety has shifted from mechanical systems to human factors (2008 Metrolink). It will be interesting to see how the wholesale PTC FRA rule changes in draft will be framed: will operations be sacrificed at the alter of safety or vice-versa? Will a locomotive suffering a PTC failure enroute be allowed to continue a journey using old fashioned things like dispatchers, radios, line signals and common sense? Will PTC glitches or cyber attacks be allowed to diminish or halt our rail networks? At least it seems like this unfunded federal mandate will ensure a steady future for workers in railroad information technology sustaining/upgrading/securing PTC hardware/software systems.
In all seriousness, along with a bit of jest (I realize we are talking about lives here, but we are also talking about a vast implementation of technology), it’s probably a lot like all those corollaries to Murphy’s law. It’s no coincidence that those little phrases ring so true with big technology implementations. It just seems like Congress has no idea of the scope of this task when they set the initial deadline.
Nice to see a Federal employee complaining about the slow rate of a mix of private and public agencies getting something done and having all those groups follow an unfunded Federal mandate. .
I’ve said before that if you drive up the cost of one of the safest transportation systems we have, you will drive people away from it and into less safe systems, nullifying any safety gain, possibly reversing it. Government doesn’t think this way because they don’t think money matters. Why else would they constantly keep borrowing more and more money?
It is fairly obvious that for the railroads continuing to kill and injure people in preventable accidents is cheaper than complying with the law. As a result they are engaging in malicious compliance as a means to demonstrate that the mandate is impossible to comply with. Lets just nationalize anyone that doesn’t meet the 2015 date.