Finally, wild speculations about trains
Apr. 26th, 2022 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitout(Outline to guide my thoughts while writing this.
But first! What’s going on with PTC?
Railroad fans want contemporary and/or SF high speed trains ; the US has really bad passenger trains and extremely cost-conscious freight ; unions on railroads want to keep their jobs and also not die
Everything about railroads is small / niche / weird — rail specific equipment, rail specific users, silo’d and old
There is no US or US adjacent railroad tech ecosystem, so contracts for new developments in rail engineering go to established companies focused on government contracts
Biden’s efforts to get rail going have a very hard road ahead
)
First, what’s going on with positive train control? We’ve been talking about self-driving cars for a while, despite the fact that cars often only have _one_ person in them anyway. I’ve made a joke about self-driving taxis for long enough that my closest friends now remember the punch line (which was why I repeated the joke so often) (Joke goes like this: what’s the difference between a regular Uber and a self-driving Uber? The regular Uber has one driver. The self-driving Uber has two). Trains, meanwhile, transport insane amounts of everything (freight) and/or lots of people (commuter rail). We don’t in any way need self-driving anything, really — what we need is better safety equipment and options so that people can transport themselves without needing to drive themselves.
Positive train control is a better safety system, however, railroad unions have a history of viewing this kind of increased automation with suspicion, as they don’t want to lose their jobs. Normal unions focus primarily on safety ; railroading is so conservative, and has been so insanely dangerous for so long, that their unions treat safety as secondary to job retention. It is a real problem. Let’s look at some of those components AFTER a quick trip over to recent developments in PTC.
https://www.railwayage.com/cs/fra-ptl-supporting-next-generation-train-operations/
This is insanely detailed! But really worth reading carefully, because you can see how serious efforts are being made to develop real world PTC within the constraints of the industry. You can see immediately that the contract was put out to bid to two companies, one you’ve heard of, Boeing, and you probably are not that impressed with any of their recent efforts anywhere at all. At least, you shouldn’t be. The other you may or may not have heard of: SAIC/Leidos. Here is a WaPo article about when that change occurred and a bit of history about them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/one-year-later-saic-and-leidos/2014/09/26/d1fefd68-4273-11e4-b437-1a7368204804_story.html
It’s from 7 years ago, and I’m sure you can find something better than that; let’s just say that if Boeing has been an outright horror show over the last few years, SAIC/Leidos is at least consistently unimpressive.
A few more things we can glean from the article!
First, this iteration of PTC involves _zero_ outside the train infrastructure _except for the GPS satellites as they already exist_, and is required to not depend on any special subscription services. Basically, rule one on this thing is it has to work with absolutely minimal, standard, perpetually available equipment. Because, railroad.
Second, this iteration of PTC specifies a 900 Mhz radio link between equipment in the front of the train and equipment at the back of the train (HOT and EOT respectively). While I do not expect my readers to _all_ know this, if you are this far into the article you probably will not be _too_ surprised to learn that this was a stupid requirement, because trains are frequently a mile or more long. Home wireless landline phone handsets used to be 900 Mhz, because it’s kinda useless for anything of any distance and specifically, 900 Mhz only works at mile long distances under ideal circumstances. This iteration of PTC is not successful, as anyone in possession of those two basic facts could have worked out (trains often a mile plus long ; 900 Mhz cannot consistently reach that far).
Finally, whatever they want to put into equipment at the EOT and HOT has to integrate with existing equipment in those locations (annoying but normal). They did allow antenna and what not to be installed on the roof.
This is not going well! I mean, it’s going, which is something. More than has been the case in the past, so, yay? But it’s terrible! Over in rockets, SpaceX is reusing rockets by landing them on their butts. Over in airplanes, we have electric battery powered planes. Over in cars, we have people sleeping on the freeway while AutoPilot illegally drives their car for them. Meanwhile, over in trains, we have someone spec’ing PTC with 900 Mhz. Why would you even do that?
I’m not 100% sure, but I have a couple theories. As noted above, railroad related unions put job retention at a higher priority than safety, so they are, generally, opposed to PTC. The owners of railroad operations, whether freight or passengers, have an all-consuming focus on cost, so they are not looking to implement PTC unless it saves them money, which it won’t, if it can’t reduce their labor costs. Perpetual stalemate there. Passengers are the only constituency that pushes for PTC, and they often forget it exists until there is an accident that PTC might fix, and then there is a flurry for a year or two that produces a contract like the one above.
Now, you might wonder, WTF can’t we just put PTC on the shorter passenger trains. Well, sure! And in fact, we’re finally starting to see discussion of separating PTC implementation and usage into high risk / low risk settings (basically, will annoying passengers or other humans complain when something goes wrong). That _might_ break the stalemate. One of the problems, however, is that everything about railroads is weird, niche, out of date, built in a really screwy way from the perspective of … anyone outside of railroading. In order for a system to pencil out, you’d need to sell it to the larger customer base (freight) in addition to the small customer base (commuter rail and amtrak).
Can passengers, railfans or the citizenry at large be mobilized to push for better train development? Hard to say, but possibly. Certainly, Brightline has been trying to make nice, commercial passenger service happen in Florida, and pre-pandemic, it was looking pretty good. They even made a deal to slap the Virgin name on it instead of Brightline, altho now there is a lawsuit as they are trying to get out of using the brand name (and they specifically say, because the brand is tarnished). If Brightline were to succeed, and tourists were to go to Florida, have a good rail experience, and come home and lobby for more of the same, maybe? If California’s efforts to built high speed high quality passenger rail were not so deeply troubled, maybe?
Certainly, the safety performance of railroads currently, in conjunction with the general invisibility of railroads to most people, has not generated enough sustained interest to pressure the participants in this industry into moving from their entrenched positions (vis a vis, capital is focused on costs and labor on job retention and no one is doing any meaningful innovation at all).
European rail systems retained a higher degree of passenger use for longer than the US for a laundry list of reasons that everyone else will give you and I will eye-roll and say, Because Oil Was Bought with Dollars while very carefully closing my mouth before the phrase, “you ninny” rolls out after. That means there is still a functioning rail system for young people to use and say, I don’t fly because of the climate impact. Could we do that here? Maybe.
One of the biggest problems with rail is the land acquisition problem. That has dogged everyone who ever had a bright idea for a new land-based transportation system. I think that any effort to increase the fraction of trips taken by rail (vs car or plane) _between cities_ (within cities, there are multiple examples of successful light rail systems being created and/or extended) has to build upon the existing rail network. And there lies another huge problem. While _technically_, passenger trains have priority (that was part of the Amtrak deal that took passenger trains off the hands of what would become freight carriers), as a practical matter, most don’t at all, and even on the Acela corridor, it’s hard to sustain what priority they do have _and that’s with nationally elected officials and powerful / wealthy businesspeople riding_. The Acela corridor is there, because it wasn’t possible to run enough plane shuttles along BosWash. We _have_ to have Acela, and we can’t even maintain a priority for those trains.
At this point, freight is preventing bringing back service lost to Hurricane Katrina, because they just don’t want the hassle — and that was a popular line that did a lot to maintain support for Amtrak and to encourage people to try riding trains in the United States. Last summer, Biden signed an executive order directing the Surface Transportation Board to consider rulemaking to deal with the prioritization problem; predictably, the railroads have pushed back.
Biden’s efforts to improve safety on railroads and to improve passenger trains (interurban and commuter heavy rail) are up against some of the toughest problems that currently exist in any industrial segment in our country today. The only thing he has going for him is that every year, more people realize, to their very great pain, how much they need to have functioning, efficient, safe rail in order for their business to continue to do business. In the decade or so after the creation of Amtrak, a lot of people around the country in a position to make decisions about a lot of things figured that highways could completely supplant railroads, so we should just get rid of rail. We _did_ lose a ton of rail, as the system retreated to its core competencies, which at the time involved a lot of unit trains moving coal. We had a comparatively brief phase of oil unit trains (*shudder*) but intermodal is finally up and running, as the true costs of heavy trucks on roadways is experienced.
As more and more states understand the costs of building more highway lanes to accommodate trucking needs (in dollars, in climate impact, in maintenance impact, in how much land has to be acquired to move a given amount of goods), more and more states will appreciate that this could be done cheaper and better and faster — that rare trifecta of Awesome — with rails instead of lanes. The question remains, however, whether that means the highways of the future will be dominated by motor coaches, or whatever future rail will have passenger trains in much higher concentration. We probably won’t see any kind of meaningful distance into that future, until we build a tech ecosystem around rail. And we are not there yet.
But first! What’s going on with PTC?
Railroad fans want contemporary and/or SF high speed trains ; the US has really bad passenger trains and extremely cost-conscious freight ; unions on railroads want to keep their jobs and also not die
Everything about railroads is small / niche / weird — rail specific equipment, rail specific users, silo’d and old
There is no US or US adjacent railroad tech ecosystem, so contracts for new developments in rail engineering go to established companies focused on government contracts
Biden’s efforts to get rail going have a very hard road ahead
)
First, what’s going on with positive train control? We’ve been talking about self-driving cars for a while, despite the fact that cars often only have _one_ person in them anyway. I’ve made a joke about self-driving taxis for long enough that my closest friends now remember the punch line (which was why I repeated the joke so often) (Joke goes like this: what’s the difference between a regular Uber and a self-driving Uber? The regular Uber has one driver. The self-driving Uber has two). Trains, meanwhile, transport insane amounts of everything (freight) and/or lots of people (commuter rail). We don’t in any way need self-driving anything, really — what we need is better safety equipment and options so that people can transport themselves without needing to drive themselves.
Positive train control is a better safety system, however, railroad unions have a history of viewing this kind of increased automation with suspicion, as they don’t want to lose their jobs. Normal unions focus primarily on safety ; railroading is so conservative, and has been so insanely dangerous for so long, that their unions treat safety as secondary to job retention. It is a real problem. Let’s look at some of those components AFTER a quick trip over to recent developments in PTC.
https://www.railwayage.com/cs/fra-ptl-supporting-next-generation-train-operations/
This is insanely detailed! But really worth reading carefully, because you can see how serious efforts are being made to develop real world PTC within the constraints of the industry. You can see immediately that the contract was put out to bid to two companies, one you’ve heard of, Boeing, and you probably are not that impressed with any of their recent efforts anywhere at all. At least, you shouldn’t be. The other you may or may not have heard of: SAIC/Leidos. Here is a WaPo article about when that change occurred and a bit of history about them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/one-year-later-saic-and-leidos/2014/09/26/d1fefd68-4273-11e4-b437-1a7368204804_story.html
It’s from 7 years ago, and I’m sure you can find something better than that; let’s just say that if Boeing has been an outright horror show over the last few years, SAIC/Leidos is at least consistently unimpressive.
A few more things we can glean from the article!
First, this iteration of PTC involves _zero_ outside the train infrastructure _except for the GPS satellites as they already exist_, and is required to not depend on any special subscription services. Basically, rule one on this thing is it has to work with absolutely minimal, standard, perpetually available equipment. Because, railroad.
Second, this iteration of PTC specifies a 900 Mhz radio link between equipment in the front of the train and equipment at the back of the train (HOT and EOT respectively). While I do not expect my readers to _all_ know this, if you are this far into the article you probably will not be _too_ surprised to learn that this was a stupid requirement, because trains are frequently a mile or more long. Home wireless landline phone handsets used to be 900 Mhz, because it’s kinda useless for anything of any distance and specifically, 900 Mhz only works at mile long distances under ideal circumstances. This iteration of PTC is not successful, as anyone in possession of those two basic facts could have worked out (trains often a mile plus long ; 900 Mhz cannot consistently reach that far).
Finally, whatever they want to put into equipment at the EOT and HOT has to integrate with existing equipment in those locations (annoying but normal). They did allow antenna and what not to be installed on the roof.
This is not going well! I mean, it’s going, which is something. More than has been the case in the past, so, yay? But it’s terrible! Over in rockets, SpaceX is reusing rockets by landing them on their butts. Over in airplanes, we have electric battery powered planes. Over in cars, we have people sleeping on the freeway while AutoPilot illegally drives their car for them. Meanwhile, over in trains, we have someone spec’ing PTC with 900 Mhz. Why would you even do that?
I’m not 100% sure, but I have a couple theories. As noted above, railroad related unions put job retention at a higher priority than safety, so they are, generally, opposed to PTC. The owners of railroad operations, whether freight or passengers, have an all-consuming focus on cost, so they are not looking to implement PTC unless it saves them money, which it won’t, if it can’t reduce their labor costs. Perpetual stalemate there. Passengers are the only constituency that pushes for PTC, and they often forget it exists until there is an accident that PTC might fix, and then there is a flurry for a year or two that produces a contract like the one above.
Now, you might wonder, WTF can’t we just put PTC on the shorter passenger trains. Well, sure! And in fact, we’re finally starting to see discussion of separating PTC implementation and usage into high risk / low risk settings (basically, will annoying passengers or other humans complain when something goes wrong). That _might_ break the stalemate. One of the problems, however, is that everything about railroads is weird, niche, out of date, built in a really screwy way from the perspective of … anyone outside of railroading. In order for a system to pencil out, you’d need to sell it to the larger customer base (freight) in addition to the small customer base (commuter rail and amtrak).
Can passengers, railfans or the citizenry at large be mobilized to push for better train development? Hard to say, but possibly. Certainly, Brightline has been trying to make nice, commercial passenger service happen in Florida, and pre-pandemic, it was looking pretty good. They even made a deal to slap the Virgin name on it instead of Brightline, altho now there is a lawsuit as they are trying to get out of using the brand name (and they specifically say, because the brand is tarnished). If Brightline were to succeed, and tourists were to go to Florida, have a good rail experience, and come home and lobby for more of the same, maybe? If California’s efforts to built high speed high quality passenger rail were not so deeply troubled, maybe?
Certainly, the safety performance of railroads currently, in conjunction with the general invisibility of railroads to most people, has not generated enough sustained interest to pressure the participants in this industry into moving from their entrenched positions (vis a vis, capital is focused on costs and labor on job retention and no one is doing any meaningful innovation at all).
European rail systems retained a higher degree of passenger use for longer than the US for a laundry list of reasons that everyone else will give you and I will eye-roll and say, Because Oil Was Bought with Dollars while very carefully closing my mouth before the phrase, “you ninny” rolls out after. That means there is still a functioning rail system for young people to use and say, I don’t fly because of the climate impact. Could we do that here? Maybe.
One of the biggest problems with rail is the land acquisition problem. That has dogged everyone who ever had a bright idea for a new land-based transportation system. I think that any effort to increase the fraction of trips taken by rail (vs car or plane) _between cities_ (within cities, there are multiple examples of successful light rail systems being created and/or extended) has to build upon the existing rail network. And there lies another huge problem. While _technically_, passenger trains have priority (that was part of the Amtrak deal that took passenger trains off the hands of what would become freight carriers), as a practical matter, most don’t at all, and even on the Acela corridor, it’s hard to sustain what priority they do have _and that’s with nationally elected officials and powerful / wealthy businesspeople riding_. The Acela corridor is there, because it wasn’t possible to run enough plane shuttles along BosWash. We _have_ to have Acela, and we can’t even maintain a priority for those trains.
At this point, freight is preventing bringing back service lost to Hurricane Katrina, because they just don’t want the hassle — and that was a popular line that did a lot to maintain support for Amtrak and to encourage people to try riding trains in the United States. Last summer, Biden signed an executive order directing the Surface Transportation Board to consider rulemaking to deal with the prioritization problem; predictably, the railroads have pushed back.
Biden’s efforts to improve safety on railroads and to improve passenger trains (interurban and commuter heavy rail) are up against some of the toughest problems that currently exist in any industrial segment in our country today. The only thing he has going for him is that every year, more people realize, to their very great pain, how much they need to have functioning, efficient, safe rail in order for their business to continue to do business. In the decade or so after the creation of Amtrak, a lot of people around the country in a position to make decisions about a lot of things figured that highways could completely supplant railroads, so we should just get rid of rail. We _did_ lose a ton of rail, as the system retreated to its core competencies, which at the time involved a lot of unit trains moving coal. We had a comparatively brief phase of oil unit trains (*shudder*) but intermodal is finally up and running, as the true costs of heavy trucks on roadways is experienced.
As more and more states understand the costs of building more highway lanes to accommodate trucking needs (in dollars, in climate impact, in maintenance impact, in how much land has to be acquired to move a given amount of goods), more and more states will appreciate that this could be done cheaper and better and faster — that rare trifecta of Awesome — with rails instead of lanes. The question remains, however, whether that means the highways of the future will be dominated by motor coaches, or whatever future rail will have passenger trains in much higher concentration. We probably won’t see any kind of meaningful distance into that future, until we build a tech ecosystem around rail. And we are not there yet.