So if you don’t want to discuss trains, don’t open it! [;)]
Reading Trains magazine in bed by mag-light - found two things so far.
Alaska has GPS - cost is about $250 per installation. What a concept. Why don’t we do that on the biggies? Sounds pretty simple and workable to me? So what is wrong with it?
AND
NS is adding 100 6 axle diesels - price indicates the units will have a DC transmission - are these GE’s rather than GM’s. (Dash 9’s or in that family rather than SD70’s?)
AND - CP is taking the Green Goat for 90 days. They seem to be passing it around to anyone that wants to try it. Anyone know if any major railroad is expressing interest in it at all?
Not to start another GE/GM bashing thread, but NS has dispatched a lot of Triple Crown trains ( the hottest train on the line, they claim) with but a single Dash9. If the reliablility (road failure rate) was as so many claim, why would they continue to do this and risk having a dead train in the middle of a single-track RR?
Mookie
the snow you sent this way missed. All we got was another 1/2" of freezing rain[censored] and looks like the kids will be in school halfway through June]V]
[V] Sorry - my aim isn’t the best. No hand-eye coordination here! We got the mix of both - so you shovel off the snow and try to drive on the ice! I’m not too sure, but think maybe I got a good chunk of Indiana and Illinois this time? Maybe even Ohio?
no snow here mookie just freezing rain and fog to boot.up was testing some diffrent enviro freindly engines in the rockies not to long ago.
stay safe
joe
…Your aim is not good Jen…Central Indiana yesterday afternoon received a bit of winter looking snow flakes but didn’t amount to very much. This morning my street is melting and slushy and the grass blades are showing through the snow in my yard…Probably now have less than 2" of the stuff on the ground avg…
I am so jealous - would put up with fog, rain, hail, sun, wind, - anything but this ice and snow. Isn’t anyone out there suffering along with us - ? Where is New York! I think they had snow! Skeets - ? Anyone got lots of snow? And how does it get from NE to NY and not hit all those big wide states in-between?
Mookie, there is lots of snow here, where I am. (About 2 hours north of Toronto, Ontario) We have about 2 1/2 - 3 feet of snow. I hiked back to the CN tracks about 500 ft. behind our house, in the bush. (Took me about 25 minutes to get back there the snow was so deep.) The snow was up to the rails-- I seen the marks of a snow plow that had plowed it. It will probably have to go over it again, it is a blizzard right now!!!
DONT BRAGG MOOK! Im still waiting for my subscription to Trains to start. [:(]I didn’t renew last year, and have to start all over. [banghead](I did get second hand copies of Jan. & Feb. though)
GPS- Mooks, most of the newer locomotives have it to use with their GETS or EMD maintenance tracking systems. The thing is hardly accurate or precise enough to use for dispatching or collision avoidance. It will at best tell you where the GPS antennae is to within about 100 feet. The military can get much closer than that with an additional p-code that is scrambled and not available to civilian users. Surveyors have to establish baselines (2 known points or more) along with checks to a known HARN (High Accuracy Reference Network) to pin down a more precise location. Major brain damage!
What’s on a locomotive is hardly better than a GPS handheld unit that you buy for about $100…the rest of the $2500 is spent on radio gear and interface software that can survive railroad service.
Congrats on promotion to 5-star el-heffe!
MC
(*) If you ever get the chance, the GETS tracking center next to the GE Locomotive Plant in Erie, PA is a fascinating place.
GPS is in the process of opening up more frequencies for civil use and talked about unjamming the p-code for a while. I have used GPS to stakeout street grades in a sub-division and was getting pretty good accuracy using the property pins as a baseline. But you’re right, unless you tie it down(use 2nd signal, or reference points) GPS can “move” on you a little.
Tree - they have been passing that around here for the last week - we are starting to look just like that! Our last really big snow was in the mid 80’s - so we really aren’t up for this.
MC - the article in Trains makes it sound really easy and inexpensive. So now I am scratching my fur over this. Would this be more practical in Alaska and maybe western NE where we have the wide open spaces - and not so practical in the more populated areas?
How can OnStar find someone in crisis and GPS can’t find a locomotive engine as well as Mookie can? (I can hear them coming) Put this altogether for me … I’ll wait…
I’d say a concept of GPS would be very practical in Alaska. Its is imporant to know where trains are located, since about 98% of the line is single track. This should bring down the accident rate, which is not too high right now.
Talk about big snow…it started snowing last night, and it still is. We got 7 inches so far. Its warm thou (By Alaskan standards), about 28F
(1)Everything to with 15 degrees of the horizon had best be clear before GPS has a prayer of working. (That means no trees, bridges, tunnels, bench cuts etc. nearby)…If the gps receiver cannot see more than 4 satellites, your positional tollerance is shot (Uncle Sam over in Colorado Springs has a maddening habit of turning satellites on and off just to screw-up your day…and if the satellite constellation coverage ever goes to pot again…oh well!)…The reliability and precision issues are huge…
(2) Locomotive generators play hell with gps receivers, the phenomena is called “multipath” disurbance. From experience in southern Missouri on old Cotton Belt’s racetrack near Dexter, MO, we’ve seen locations “move” hundreds of feet or suddenly jump up a couple feet in elevation when a train passed.
(if you think GPS is easy to use and foolproof, would you like to buy some oceanfront property in Southern New Mexico???)
(3) Onstar is a combination of GPS, GIS (crude) and radio telemetry (a la LoJack) …if +/- 1/4 mile is ok, go for it and understand that it’s hardly exact, can’t tell if you are on the road or in a ditch or driving the wrong way on the freeway…That kind of oops on a single track railroad with opposing movements is lethal.
(4) If you are moving at 60 mph and want a plot of where you are for speed and distance at an interval of say every 50 feet, you better have a computer that costs what the engine did when it was new. Processing GPS data realtime is a computer efficiency nightmare…When I’m out with my $30,000+ survey grade GPS units, a kinnematic solution marking/locating points with the GPS receiver mounted on a cart forces us to walk almost in slow motion to keep from overdriving the computer/data collector.(the data processor can’t keep up! and the information is needed now and not after post-processing)…and a $250 dollar toy can do better.??? As stated in another post, most folks cannot tell the difference between GPS, GIS and a hole in the grou