GandyDancer wrote:At 135 mph, it really doesn't much matter what the engineer can see, does it? He or she couldn't stop soon enough to avoid anything within visual range anyway. As long as grade crossings remain, so does the risk of collision. And increasing engineer visibility won't help much if at all.
Well, yes. But it's still possible to provide reasonable grade crossing prtection and decent visability.
Seems like the FRA regs for design are more aimed at insulating bureaucrats from liability and insurors from tort remedies than in advancing the industry or making my commute shorter
Bingo. Everytime there's a crash, everyone screams 'do something', and so, Washington does 'something'. The problem being, like everything else, the government's treating the symptons, not the problem. The FRA's standards are a nice smiley face on the issue, which is why the heck trains are bumping into each other in the first place. It's interesting to note that the Japanese, who have by far the safest rail system in the world, use equipment that wouldn't even meet european crash standards. In fact, they have <b>zero</b> protection at all. Because they operate on the principal that there will be <b>no</b> crashes. This is the opposite extreme of the US view, which is train crashes are a fact of life that can't be avoided, thus we should try to eliminate deaths from them.
Realistically, you can absolutely avoid train-train collisions, but train-car and train-truck collisions are less avoidable. Thus, you use what technology you have to avoid train train collisions, and design equipment to be safer when it hits a car or truck. And current US designs, even recent ones, do horridly in grade crossing accidents.
I just got my first ride on the Maglev at Pudong airport in Shanghai and I respectfully submit to all here that before we argue anymore about how nice we can make an internal combustion-powered locomotive look, we ought to start wondering why this country still relies on 170-year-old technology to help drive its economy.
Well, maglev's a dead end, ultimately. But, the US, in terms of passenger rail, is firmly stuck in the 70's and slowly regressing into the 30's. There has been no significant advances in the state of the art in the US since the late 60's and the M-1s and Silverliners, and recent equipment has often tended to be either not more advanced, or a step behind the stuff it's replacing. We're still buying DC locomotives for passenger use, equipment weight has taken a severe upturn, speeds are not better, energy use has gone up, and safety has not increased. We're runninjg a passenger rail system that's the laughingstock of the industrialized world. It flat out costs more, carries fewer, and does it slower.
We might as well argue about paint schemes, nobody seems to be willing to ask the hard questions about passenger rail in the US....