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The texting and talking was determined to be major cause of the accident. It lead to further restrictions on personal communication devices. Special Instructions were amended essentially saying they must be off, and off your person. It lead to cameras being installed in operating cabs of revenue trains (not work equipment-there are pages and pages of train type definitions). It also lead to mandatory automatic speed control systems, at least that's what the LIRR called it. The LIRR had to update its system. We had it since the 1950's due to a horrible collision one Thanksgiving holiday eve. Ours worked better. Honest.Well, I recall a train mishap out around Los Angeles where the operator was exchanging messages with rail enthusiasts as well as one around Baltimore where the operator was for some reason speeding up when he should have been slowing down. I don't know if cellphone conversations and tests were ever determined to be a factor in the Baltimore mishap.
Things is, one of the nicest aspects of flying is that there are periods you can relax to a greater extent than is possible with automobile travel; you can trim an airplane up and let go. And I suspect that operating a train has similar periods, since you are not actually steering the thing; most of the time it is just monitoring. But flying at 500 ft AGL while examining a pipeline is not one of those idyllic periods.
As a small child, in the last days of steam I went to see my grandmother on a train "fired" by my father. Later h was a driver and had to learn the same "route" called the Esk Valley line. It is all twists and turns and gradients etc You cant compare driving that type of train to flying a plane, but it is nowhere near as simple as most think.The texting and talking was determined to be major cause of the accident. It lead to further restrictions on personal communication devices. Special Instructions were amended essentially saying they must be off, and off your person. It lead to cameras being installed in operating cabs of revenue trains (not work equipment-there are pages and pages of train type definitions). It also lead to mandatory automatic speed control systems, at least that's what the LIRR called it. The LIRR had to update its system. We had it since the 1950's due to a horrible collision one Thanksgiving holiday eve. Ours worked better. Honest.
I was one of the guys who steered the train. The engineer has the brake and gas pedal. I had the steering wheel and traffic lights. I had a model train set. One to one scale.
Two stories about that.One odd aspect of GPS was that the railroads were one of the first non-military users. While it is rather hard to wander off the track and get lost in a RR train, it is also hard to tell exactly where you are along a stretch of track, especially at night. With GPS the engineers could tell exactly when to add or reduce power to handle grades and I suppose curves as well. I guess use of GPS saved them a lot of money on fuel costs. And of course GPS transponders should help with safety as well.
Back in 1969 I recall hearing that much of the bumper wheat crop would be lost because the railroads did not know enough about the locations of all of their railcars to be able to transport all of the wheat. I sure hope that bar codes, computers, cellphone technology, and GPS has fixed that problem by now.
That news did lead to me thinking about the ideas for rail deployment of ICBMs. I could imagine a ICBM crew sitting on some lonely siding somewhere with its crew asking, "Anybody know where we are? Leroy, how about you go find a 7/11 or something and ask?"
Yeah, but we could have had automated remote reporting of switch positions since at least 1940. Even before the 40's, the airlines had radio receivers mounted in boxes on telephone poles with landline links so they could talk to their airplanes.The crew and dispatcher must have a clear understanding of the train condition and all affected switches.