Finally got to look at one yesterday. Went out and dogcaught a local late last night. My conductor just got back from a cruise in Mexico, so we spent the better part of our trip talking about that. When we got to town, and after clipping the junk off the rear, i started tying down the power and then i noticed three screens on the desk. Theres a new breaker behind the hog seat and a cab signal looking knob/switch under the conductor desk by the steps. After turning both of those things on, the third screen lit up and the computer started looking for instructions from space, as far as i could tell. After a couple minutes of that these big words popped up "Communications Based Train Control". I finished doing what i had to do and came back up there and turned it off, nothing had changed on the screen. Once i made it back to the shack i realized i should have un-nullified the controls and threw the reverser and gave her some gas to see if things changed..
Interesting that one of those wound up out there at Green River; I bet someone pulled the trigger without looking at the target on that one...someone who will probably get the usual conference call verbal thrashing that is normal for SNAFUs at the ol' UP....
Anyhoo, those CBTC units probably wont do anything special unless the track has been mapped out by the "GPS train"....don't ask me what it looks like, but such a creature is rumored to exist. (Might be 2 guys in a hyrail for all I know) That third screen is supposed to bring up something that looks a lot like the train / track profile in the simulator. Shows your train snaking along the grades behind you, and the blocks ahead of you up to and past the next absolute. I think it adds blocks on as you tick them off and it looks a little like CAD in terms of colors and such. Kinda nifty, but dont see how it even comes close to replacing a pair of eyes and ears....or a pair of boots on the ground doing rollbys...(ahem)