Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos
Are there any railroads in North America that have already implemented this technology? Is there a template or blueprint to follow? Does everybody have to invent this from scratch?
On the East Coast all the NEC-member commuter rail agencies that use cab signals are installing the "Version 1.1" equivalent of Amtrak's ACSES system, which has been running nearly bulletproof on the Shoreline to Boston since 2001. Every Providence, Stoughton, Needham, and Franklin train has 1-1/2 decades under their belts with ACSES on the SW Corridor. ACSES layers on top of the pre-existing track circuits and cab signals to add the PTC features while still relying on the hard-wired infrastructure to handle the rest of the job. The only reason why Amtrak is still struggling to get it up and running in the immediate NYC and Philly areas is because what little radio spectrum the RFID transmitters need for the PTC overlay gets interfered with to hell by all the cell phones, WiFi, TV/radio, etc. the two biggest metropolises on the NEC puke out. Not really an issue up here where spectrum crowding is orders of magnitude less.
The freights, and the commuter rail agencies out in Midwest/West that run on freight-hosted track, have a clusterfuck of different systems going in. Double-clusterfucky where they host passengers because the systems have to be able to square the wildly different stopping distances of passenger trains vs. 100+ car freight trains (and obviously they're in no mood to play nice with passenger trains when the deadline is enough of a problem for freight compliance alone). Since hard-wired cab signals are mostly an East Coast thing their systems are all much more wireless- and GPS -hungry. Most of the lead time since the mandate was passed in 2008 has been wasted haggling with spectrum acquisition. Congress was supposed to pass follow-up legislation securing that spectrum. They of course did not, so the RR's have to do it themselves. All the systems are supposed to 'converge' on interoperability, but Congress left no blueprint for how that's going to happen. So they start out with all kinds of problematic fragmentation. It's not surprising nobody's going to make it with all the extra labor they were sacked with being thrown to the wolves by Congress.
The T has one extra problem that no other East Coast commuter rail has: the cab signal ban on the northside. Unlike CSX, Norfolk Southern, the D.C.-Boston south commuter rail operators, and some of the smaller freight RR's carriers that sprung out of the remnants of Penn Central, Boston & Maine never used cab signals on its historical system (only exception: Springfield Line, which was a very late-era pickup from Conrail in 1982). When the T bought all the northside lines in 1976 from B&M in the company's bankruptcy restructuring, they had to agree to keep the cab signal ban in perpetuity. Pan Am still won't allow it after 32 years of owning B&M. So the ACSES flavor that gets installed north is the only such instance of it in existence that'll have to operate without the cab signal layer. Which it's flexible enough to do--in theory--but the T are the sole guinea pigs who have to design/debug. They won't have the It Just Works™ advantage of copying what's been in use on the NEC for 15 years. And...well...trust right now is not exactly robust in them being institutionally up to the complexity of that task.
For the other NEC-member RR's, all of them are *close* to being ready and probably only going to need a 2-year extension to wrap, according to the progress reports those agencies have been filing with the FRA. The MTA has finished design and awarded the whole-shebang billion dollar contract for Metro North and LIRR PTC construction. Amtrak is installing it on the Springfield Line and upper Hudson right now, and is almost finished debugging those last NJ/PA gaps on the NEC. LIRR and SEPTA have active construction going on infilling their last cab signal-less lines so they're set for installation, and ConnDOT just committed funding to signalize the Waterbury Branch. MARC has some problems with the CSX-owned Brunswick and Camden Lines where it'll be using the freight system and not ACSES, but they're the only such outlier. Downeaster is (probably?) exempt unless Pan Am gets rejected on its claimed exemption. Vermonter, Ethan Allen Express, and Cape Flyer south of Middleboro all are exempt from the mandate along with their host RR's because the combined daily passenger + freight schedules are too light to trigger the mandate and the co-mingled freights don't transport enough annual hazmat carloads to trigger.
The T, thanks to having 4 lines share the NEC under ACSES for 15 years, does have a fully-compliant vehicle fleet...the only leg up it's got over every other East Coast CR operator. The now-retired Screamers were the last locomotives that didn't have ACSES installed, and the 25 Bombardier cab cars the last passenger cars without it. The Bombers are getting outfitted right now with modified signal units harvested from the retiring MBB cars and will be all set before winter.
But field installation? Yeah, the T is fucked. No commuter railroad in the U.S. has done less planning to-date than them. They spent a grand total of $1.7M from 2008-2014 on a project that's carrying a $414M system-wide price tag, have only $23M budgeted in the (post-deadline) 2016 fiscal year, spent only $450K last year and
under-spent their budget last year because they did so little, and have allocated no funds for prerequisite installation of cab signals on the Franklin, Needham, and inner Worcester lines. The 5-year extension of the deadline proposed by Congress won't be nearly enough to get them compliant.
Complete, utter negligence. And it's going to cost them big in federal fines to continue operating past-deadline with extra deferrals to buy them time to do such a massive systemwide install. Far bigger and equally cash-strapped systems are years further along towards compliance. Christ, even perennial Exhibit A's of "do exactly the opposite of what they're stupidly doing" SEPTA say they'll only need several months of extra time to finish up. It's not gotten a lot of press because the arcane nature of the mandate is very difficult for public to grasp, and the Congressional freakshow dwarfs any misadventures of the individual RR's. But this is going to become one of the next big front-page issues of MBTA dysfunction making taxpayers fed up to hell with the institutional brainrot. 7 years of lead time and they did almost literally nothing.
