Thank you, I have corrected this in my post.
Dan
âŚthat deployed any hardwareâŚ
You donât seem aware of the ATCS committee.
The path to an ROI was for increasing capacity/safety on dark territory. Properly developed, it could have been implemented in signalled territory, replacing existing signal systems.
But, no. We have ânon-vitalâ PTC that relies on commercial data for vital things like the braking algorithm.
Opportunity missed.
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âŚbecause RRs didnât do any investment for 20 years. Left WABTEC taking the riskâŚand reaping the reward.
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I wasnât saying that BN was the only railroad working on advanced train control. I was just saying that the railroad that deployed ARES was BN, not BNSF.
Much of the equipment that would be needed for such a system was deployed in the initial implementation of PTC. That was why BNSF went ahead and started development of their âvirtual blockâ technology. The FRA never acted on BNSFâs waiver request for this technology, and so it got put on the shelf.
Now notice what happened when FRA denied BNSFâs waiver request for automated track inspection: BNSF sued the government and won.
These two situations are not identical. But the takeaway here is that the benefits of moving block technology were not worth fighting for, even though the cost would be much lower now than it would have been in pre-PTC days. There is no way in hell the benefits would have produced a positive ROI if you had to include all of the on-board and wayside technology that the system requires.
I would agree that, if Congress had set a 20- or 30-year implementation schedule that allowed time to develop a better interoperable PTC system, then we might have wound up with a better interoperable PTC system. Thatâs the danger of locking in the state-of-the-art in technology at any given point in time. Youâre seeing some of the same arguments play out in the US air traffic control field today: how much do we wait to fully develop new systemsâ potential when thereâs a need to get something done right now. (Thatâs also the danger of having Congress legislate on things they donât know much about; they chose to believe advocates who claimed that PTC was an existing technology that was ready for deployment, when in fact it was a half-finished research project.)
But it is not true that the industry did nothing for several decades, as outlined in my first post in this thread.
Dan
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Historically?
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It took over 30 years for the US to fully adopt air brakes, from Westinghouseâs invention in 1869 to the Safety Appliance Act of 1893.
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It took US railroads nearly three decades to fully adopt Janney knuckle couplers after the patent was issued in 1873. Widespread adoption occurred primarily because of the 1893 federal Safety Appliance Act, which outlawed the dangerous link-and-pin couplers that were still in common use.
The slow adaptation of both the coupler and air brakes also didnât help that the railroads were doing nothing but expanding as fast as possible either. There was probably about half a million cars they had to switch over on both items. Plus the number of miles of track went from 45k miles to 180k miles. Yes the government made these things mandatory. However the railroads also were busy hauling the nations freight.
They were expanding often with government assistance to one the pockets of speculators like Fisk et al. Meanwhile workers got mangled or killed because of a lack of safety features, such ss modern couplers
Your knowledge of technology is sadly lacking for one who states figures with such assurance.
1869 was a straight air brake, similar to the independent on locomotives. It most assuredly did not fail safe.
The âsafeâ alternative â just as capable for the typical feeble speeds and loads of that era â was the vacuum brake developed by Eames and others by the early 1880s. That approach, with a little finaglery and chauvinism, gave the English their brake system for many years.
The earliest Westinghouse system that âfailed safeâ was not developed until after 1887, and even with Lorenzo Coffinâs zeal itâs only about half a decade from there to the Act.
Where you might better complain is the lag between the 1893 Act and the final passage of the Power Brake Law a decade and a half laterâŚ
Westinghouse developed the automatic air brake, what we still use with many improvements, in 1872. It was fail safe, but air only vented out of the brakepipe at the engineerâs valve or at a break in the brakepipe. Brakes applied throughout the train, but set up faster near the engine or break in the brakepipe.
The 1887 development was âquick action,â having each car vent air to atmosphere speeding up the propagation of the brake application through the train. It made for smoother braking action throughout the train.
Many railroads adopted air brakes, both the straight air and then the early automatic air for passenger equipment, but not freight equipment. Ironically, forcing the adoption of both the knuckle couplers and automatic air brakes is what allowed trains to get longer and heavier.
Jeff
A technicality and not all that accurate one by the resident Polymath. Westinghouse continually worked to improve his air brake. The fact is the railroads didnât adopt an air brake system until they were forced to by federal law.
The vacuum brake was adopted mostly in countries where Britain had influence: South Africa, India, Argentina. Supersession occured in the UK, starting in the 1970s.
The early British vacuum brakes were not failsafe either. Just straight vacuum from the exhaust ejectors that pulled vacuum to pull the brakes on. After a very bad crash late 1890s the Brit government demanded fail safe automatic vacuum brakes comparable to our air brakes. The Brits stuck with vacuum brakes until the 1960s/70s when speeds just got too high for vacuum.
An interesting thing was that the vacuum system at that time was American-derived (Eames IIRC) so it was amusing to read some of the somewhat chauvinistic comments in the contemporary engineering literature about the inherent superiority of the âatmospheric brakingâ over what was by then evolved Westinghouse one-pipe-with-triples-and-emergency â but comparatively complicated â air.
One of the early comparative tests was interesting. A âcomparableâ test between air and vacuum was made, and what seemed like a sensible criterion (absolute stopping distance in emergency) revealed that the vacuum-brakes test train stopped in a shorter distance. This was actually canny fakery on the part of the vacuum-system engineers. Since vacuum brake cylinders are obviously much bigger in apparent size than Westinghouse-brake cylinders, to casual inspection, the idea was that larger effective brake force could be arranged with even larger cylinders than âequivalentâ, but not telling anyone this explicitly. (I always think of the steam vs. diesel jiggery-pokery in those early-Fifties testing on N&W when I think of this testing).
Meanwhile there seemed to be an assumption in the part of many of the Victorian British that momentum, once expensively acquired, should not be wasted except as a grudging afterthought. So many of the absolute disadvantages of vacuum braking were less evident (particularly on goods services!) whereas the lower costs and inherent perception of failsafe action were easily argued.
The interesting argument could be made that the legislative actions on air brakes (1893 and 1908) helped establish the Westinghouse system as âstandardâ (even with respect to the through-pipe requirement for non-air-braked cars in interchange) vs. vacuum or mechanical alternatives.
That is the reason for the Scientific Method to be applied to the results, the tests have to be statistically validated as comparable and the results have to be repeated in others doing similar but different testing.
Testers doing jiggery pokery to achieve there intended results is FRAUD.
Another of your designs? You couldnât address the fact that very few countries used a vacuum system. Why,? Inferior. And even UK is abandoning it.
Why the ad-hominem implications? There were certainly applications where vacuum was considered superior at the time of its adoption â the original Eames system on one of the New York elevated railroads, for instance, where there were a vast number of stops and simple, cheap apparatus was all that was needed. In countries that canât afford to buy or maintain complicated compressors and valves, a simple steam-ejector âeductorâ could produce a âgood enoughâ vacuum with relatively little high-pressure sealing, etc. If I remember correctly, the British actually noted at one point that ECP vacuum systems relieved much of the time drawbacks to prompt application of vacuum braking on longer trains.
In my opinion one of the great unsung innovations was the cross-compound Westinghouse air compressor, actually more efficient at using steam mass flow to create pressurized air than a steam-powered rotating drive would produce. That made building pressure to 140psi while charging reservoirs as prompt as pumping down asymptotically from 14.7, with much the same reliability over time as the inductor.
âInferiorâ is ABDX compared to a system with proportional or graduated release. Release and recharge before you can get brakes again? Use pressure maintaining to make graduated release difficult or impossible ⌠and allow accidents like the one at Lac Megantic to occur as the FRED turbine, by design, bleeds away the set.
I donât think the UK would abandon a vacuum system if it was as good as you seem to contend.
Besides the obvious safety aspects of the automatic air brake, Westinghouseâs incentive for developing was getting a strong patent as there was too much prior art for the straight air brake.
Air brakes were seeing significant use in passenger trains by the mid 1870âs and Miller couplers were in common use on passenger trains by the late 1880âs. It is easy to forget that it is much easier to apply new brakes and couplers passenger trains than freight trains. There is much tighter control of the makeup of a passenger train, so consists could all be old style or all new style. In order for air brakes to work on a freight train, the cars would need to be arranged for most if not all equipped cars to arranged next to the locomotive.
A Hinrichs accomplishment before he was forced to âwalk the plankâ
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Had the engineer made even just a minimum reduction on the automatic brake before leaving the train, Lac Megantic probably would have never had happened. Their antiquated air brake rule, I believe a holdover from when the line was CP, since changed, allowed them to leave the automatic brake in the release/running position. Had the automatic been set, the air leaking off at the air turbine EOT wouldâve caused the brakes to set harder.
Jeff
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The Carolina, Clinchfield, & Ohio is re-born.
[out of service for a whole year]
Thanks BaltACD for sharing a great video.