Cascades 501 Wreck 18 December 17

mark777 wrote:While they continue to perfect them, there is no perfect in the world. in fact, I would bet money that there will be just as many accidents even when PTC will be up and running. What will they say then?

An incredible amount of automation has been added to airplanes. Autopilot, ILS, and in general enough computers on board with backups to backups of systems, and yet still, planes crash. The Metro Red Line was a fully automated line, and it crashed. Nothing is infallible.

Humans are generally poor at judging risk. While I've been skeptical of PTC, and know that it won't solve all problems, it will in fact help with many preventable accidents, like this one. The real risk comes about with complacency and trust in those systems. All it will take is for some coding to be entered incorrectly and suddenly we have a new class of accidents with different root causes. Or for the system to be totally failed, but not known to the engineer.

mark777 wrote:Speed restriction signs are in place as a reminder to the engineer that the upcoming restriction must have the train at ___ speed. It is often placed prior to the curve but too close for a train operating at excessive speed to slow down and/or stop, but in some locations they are placed well in advanced although I rarely see it set up that way

On the BNSF there are speed restriction signs, and advance restriction signs. The advance speed restriction sign is the same type of sign, but mounted at an angle.

And sure enough, here it is on Google Earth:

Here's a Google Earth view of the area. The advance speed restriction is designated by the (horrible use of Microsoft Paint) angled P-30 sign to the east, two miles from the curve. The rectangular P-30 sign is the start of the restriction.

The red indicates the path of the train, as opposed to the black which is the railroad route.

DutchRailnut wrote:That would make zero sense, the old route has no PTC either and has twice amount of traffic .

The Seattle Sub, along Puget Sound, carries a lot more than "twice amount" - I believe it's somewhere in the 30-40 freight train a day range, between BNSF and Union Pacific.

jonnhrr wrote:Will a robot be able to recognize a trespasser on the track and tell the difference through pattern recognition from say a bird flying in front of the camera or even a piece of trash? Seems like there are way too many situations that can happen on a railroad to run it without a human present to make judgments. Look how hard it has been to get self driving cars to work reliably.

My car (a 2016 Mazda CX-5) will alert me if a person or other moving object is approaching the rear of my vehicle in a 180 degree arc. (It won't auto-brake in reverse, however.)

It is also equipped with two forms of automatic braking; at or under 9 MPH if I approach a fixed object and I am moving forward, it will bring the car to a stop. Before I purchased the vehicle, the dealer actually had me test it by setting up a large cardboard box in the lot, and told me to drive into it. The car stopped inches away from the box. At higher speeds it will slow down the car (not bring it to a stop) but with the intent of lessening possible injury.

Surely, it is possible to adapt the technology to a train, but then you have the issue of "false positives" where the train will go into emergency for, say, a fallen tree branch. And then you have the aspect of train handling - is it desirable for the train to go into emergency? Maybe the better option is containment of the right-of-way, with sensors along the fence to detect trespassers which would communicate to nearby trains to slow down or stop until someone can investigate.

F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:WSDOT has drained all its options on the Charger contract, so actually is sitting pretty comfortable on power cushion right this moment whereas they're not with the Talgo fleet if multiple cars from this set are totaled. There's also still 36 unexercised state options on the Charger contract in Caltrans & IDOT hands with no deadline on exercising before 2019 if WSDOT wants a laundered unit to produce a new replacement.

This seems convoluted; why couldn't WSDOT simply order another unit from Siemens if they so desired? Did Siemens put the model out for sale as a one-time offer and proclaim "If you don't order it today, you are flat out of luck!"?

wigwagfan:

in my neck of the woods I don't see advanced speed limit signs that far in advanced, although I have seen them on other RRs. And I would expect them even more so where freight trains travel at high speeds which would require brake applications at much greater distances. This of course doesn't help this crew out by having that fact out there that they had considerable advanced warning that there was a speed restriction ahead.

We know the PTC system was in place ,but,not online,waiting for the rest of the of the Sounder/BNSF PTC systems to be ready to go online.
Also this was the first train to use the entire cutoff instead of the older route,there was word of a possible obstruction placed on the tracks in
the first reports from the wreck site. There were months of testing and Qualifying with Sounder and Amtrak equipment
There are still some "Treehuggers" or other type of NIMBY's that could have placed something on the track as a "protest" of sorts.
(As a possibility,yet to proven or disproven)
However that close to a Military Base would not go unoticed (I-5 cuts thru the middle of this base,tracks are beside the southbound lanes)
With the NTSB on site and investigating,IT might be a good time to wait and see what develops.

Fox news did report at first that there was an obstruction placed on the tracks but then you never heard of it again. In any case, if there was something there, there would have been damage to the rails or for that matter a visible view of the obstruction itself. The lead unit did not show damage that was consistent with striking an object on the tracks although it did strike the signal bridge and some trees along the way. Either way, that doesn't X-out the fact that it was doing 80mph on a 35mph curve. That was just a case of the media problem solving something without having a shred of evidence. Very much like when they report the crash of a jetliner but show a photo of a Cessna. Or my favorite, a Boeing A380. (aviation buffs will know the joke on that).

DutchRailnut wrote:That would make zero sense, the old route has no PTC either and has twice amount of traffic .

But there is no question that the engineers are trained on the old route.

If they have to go to non-talgo units, will the schedule have to be adjusted slower?

Early reports often have problems ... I don't see anyone complaining about the "six dead" headlines that showed up everywhere. (eg: Only three dead? I thought this was a disaster?) The early reports of a train striking a vehicle were correct ... the vehicles just happened to be on the interstate beneath the railroad track.

Two early focuses of coverage was on the local mayor's prediction of an accident (which was a prediction of a grade crossing incident, not an overspeed derailment) and on the train traveling 81 in a 79 (without clarifying that it was a 30 MPH curve). Max speed was 79, why was the train going 81? As if 2 MPH was the problem.

I saw a station using clipart of what appeared to be a CTA train for the story. I suppose we should be happy they didn't show a freight train.

Do we know anything about the second head end employee?

This being an inaguaral run—perhaps he was Amtrak brass. That would make for a distraction.

I would say at this point if there was a good reason why the engineer derailed the train we would know if by now.

Not to get too off-topic, but how are speed restrictions enforced in Europe (say Germany or the UK)? I do not seem to recall any recent speed violation accidents there other than the one in Spain. They run many more trains in Europe than in the US, so one would expect to have many more speeding accidents than we do and still somehow that is not the case. What are they doing better than us? Do they all have their version of PTC installed?

In Germany, it's mainly signalled with distant/main speed signals.
There are fixed ones or lighted, the latter can show different speeds, depending on the situation.
When approaching a distant signal at "danger (slow down to the expected signalled speed)", you have to press an "order"-button and reduce your
speed within a fixed rate of deceleration until you're "under" the signalled speed restriction, this works the same way with normal distant/main Blocksignals.
If you fail to reduce your speed in the way described above or pushing the "order"-button, your train
will automatically go into emergency braking.
The speed is checked in a simple way with three inductive contacts near the rails,
just measuring the time between the first and the second contact, and activating (or cancelling) the third one.
These contacts are commonly called "Landmines"..

Simply, but proofed.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_ra ... tsanzeiger" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punktf%C3 ... influssung" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;