Good afternoon today my train on the UP Northline was delayed due to signal problems. This was due to the computer system that controls the signals beeing down and it caused delays on UP’s entire system. Alot of passengers wondered why there wasen’t a back up system in place, so my questions are what would your idea of a back system be and why there isn’t one in place? thank you.
Good question…and difficult and parochial to answer at best. Snarky is that those who run railroads today run by computer and often have never run a railroad any other way…some never having rode a train! But there are ways to do it…easily the most prominent is to issued Form D’s and instructions by radio to the train crews. But the dispatcher’s desks have to be able to reach trains by radio or cell phones…and if the power is out at the dispatcher’s desk, he probably has no phone system or lights to see his phone…and there could be no power either at booster radio towers, either, making communications poor at best. Even dispatcher’s bunkers where there are–or should be–back up batteries and power generators, takes time to kick in and bring computers back up and on line. What is missing is a total back up dispatching system from a remote location…best if it is a dispatching location which can be plugged in via telephone lines or radio connections and already staffed. Railroads used to have that luxury of patching phone lines across divisions when things went awry. Another problem, the computer contains the “picture” of what trains are where at what time…used to be on a handwritten form spread out on a desk in front of the dispatcher but now its the stored digits inside that hard drive or master computer which can’t show anything unless the power is on. Yeah, computers are great, time saving, efficient, safe, and up to date. But too often when it loses power, or the whole system loses power, there is nothing left to do but curse the darkness…even if the sun is shining.
I wouldn’t even attempt to answer that question until I knew a little more about the nature of the outage. It isn’t just a question of electrical power, where a backup generator could put things back to normal.
While I was out running errands this morning, I noticed that the signals at Grace (a control point) were all red, within a couple of minutes of the expected arrival time of a scoot. I thought that was unusual, but it had to be connected to the problem. Looking the other way, at some intermediate signals, there were two greens and a red…the greens would have been a default aspect for that particular bridge, and the red suggested that something was lined up from beyond the signal, or was in the block. Everyone should be grateful that these systems are fail-safe, in the sense that no accidents would happen because of faulty indications.
UP lines are controlled from a computer system located in the Harriman Dispatch Center in Omaha. Although on the outside that building appears to be a nicely restored 1880’s warehouse, it’s interior is protected a massive reinforced concrete bunker structure – Omaha is tornado country as well as having SAC headquarters nearby. The computer and its backup and power systems are equally elaborate.
I think it is far more likely that the UP North line suffered a communications link failure. Does anyone have knowledge of similar outages elsewhere on the UP at about the same time?
As I mentioned (or maybe not so clearly), Metra called it a UP system failure. I know that “my” line (UP West) was also down.
Ah!! The old, time-tested sideways buckpass gambit.
Depending on the time of day, you could probably run the UP North (Kenosha Sub) and Northwest (Harvard Sub) without a computer. There aren’t too many off-peak (non rush hour) trains on those lines. As long as you have radio communication and a Metra schedule. The UP West (Geneva Sub)? Forgot it. I’ll wait for the computer.
This is what happens when the hamster stops running and his wheel stops spinning…
CC