Washington DC To Return To Automatic Metro Trains 179
Bruce66423 (1678196) writes with news of interest to anyone with reason to ride mass transit in the U.S., specifically on the D.C. Metro system: After a crash some five years ago, automatic operation was abandoned. Now however replacement of 'faulty' modules means that moving the whole system on to automatic operation can happen. One quote is depressing: "And because trains regularly lurch to a halt a few feet short of where they should be at platforms, Metrorail riders have grown accustomed to hearing an announcement while they're waiting to board: 'Stand clear. Train moving forward.'" That never happens on the London underground with human operators? What's wrong with American drivers?
What's Wrong with DC Drivers? (Score:2, Insightful)
Never seems to happen in New York. What's the problem in DC?
Re:What's Wrong with DC Drivers? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: What's Wrong with DC Drivers? (Score:2)
Re: What's Wrong with DC Drivers? (Score:3)
The new 7000 cars are being delivered to metro and replacing the 30 year old cars first. Within two years most of the cars will be new again.
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More precisely, 38-year-old cars. WMATA took delivery of the 1000 series in 1976 [wikipedia.org] -- which was closer to WWII than to today.
Re:What's Wrong with DC Drivers? (Score:4, Funny)
Nothing's ever on the level in D.C.
Now imagine the terrain in A.C.!
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The elevators are obstinate, bullheaded, piggish, among many other dysfunctions....;)
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A couple of bottles of Olde English 800 will screw up the reflexes.
What's Wrong with DC Drivers? (Score:2)
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Cute theory, but the rail system is controlled by a collaboration of DC, Virginia, and Maryland. Far from one party in control. Also not dysfunctional as far as I can see.
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The Lobbying Industry.
What's wrong with American drivers? (Score:4, Insightful)
> What's wrong with American drivers?
DC's metro trains were designed to be operated automatically the vast majority of the time. Hence, the acceleration and braking systems were optimized for automatic operation (as opposed to manual operation) and it is difficult for a human driver to control the train's movements precisely and smoothly.
Re:What's wrong with American drivers? (Score:5, Informative)
I have a perspective on this that most probably don't, as I was a monorail driver at Disney World for a number of years. Contrary to what some might imagine, the current Bombardier Mark VI trains there are not attractions but are in fact full-up transit vehicles, and Bombardier continues to sell them as such (although with different bodies and newer electronics). If D.C.'s trains handle anything like ours did, I can understand why some of the drivers short-stop or otherwise have problems.
Our Mark VI trains were originally designed to accommodate automation as well, but I don't think this in itself really is a factor. More importantly, each train had its own "personality" and handled differently, and all of them would take between one and two seconds to respond after an input was commanded except for E-stops, which instantly opened the relay contactors and applied air to the friction brakes. One train might be ultra-responsive (relatively) to the throttle and have really tight brakes, which made it easy to drive and predict stopping distances with great accuracy. Others would act like your control inputs were more of a suggestion than a command, necessitating that you be looking a little ahead of where you actually wanted to be in order to stop where you were supposed to. We had some drivers that had difficulty dealing with that, and would often blow their stops by a couple of feet or so on a train with loose brakes, or would stop short if they were in a tighter train that didn't require so much anticipation of its behavior. I don't think I ever had a short stop, but did have trains "slide" on me a few times and missed the stop by just enough to have to back up a couple of inches to get lined up with the gates.
I would imagine transit trains everywhere exhibit similar unique peculiarities, and the only consistent way to deal with it is for the driver to be ultra-conservative, which can lead to the occasional short stop. It's not so much a problem for an automation system that can directly respond in milliseconds and isn't being moved between trains with wildly varying performance characteristics.
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BART trains (in the SF Bay Area) have some peculiarities which do seem to be related to the partial automation. The trains frequently have to be 'repositioned' on the platform, but it's apparently* because the door mechanisms don't always engage. If the driver scoots forward a bit and stops again, then the doors open normally.
*I think this because some drivers make announcements implying it's so, e.g. "sorry folks, we have to reposition to get the doors open."
Re:What's wrong with American drivers? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Washington DC Metro and San Francisco BART are very similar systems and were designed from the outset for fully automatic operation. The platform position errors are learned by the system and corrected over time, and this calculation also measures the weight of each car.
The real challenge is that under crush loads the system tries to get a good idea how much braking force to apply with the extra weight of the passengers, but often gets the calculation wrong because even though the system "knows" how much e
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That's good that it's conservative like that, but does it actually bring it to a complete stop short of the mark? There have been times when I've been driving a full train that it slowed a bit more aggressively than I would have expected, but it was easy to just modulate the brakes to hit the mark without stopping short
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Then again, our trains were substantially lighter (about 50 tons empty, 80 tons crush load), so I'm sure it was easier for us to deal with the varying inertia.
Up until the point where a bigger brake won't help, you can solve this problem completely with bigger brakes, which provide consistency. Well, it works for everything but trains, so I don't see why not trains too.
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that's very light for a commuter train, our tram system uses four-segment cars that weigh over 120 tons dry. Those things seldom go over 35mph. London's underground trains are 27 tons *per car*. Dry. And each train has six of them.
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speaking of weight, the DLR trackbeds had to be reinforced for the Olympics not because of the extra weight of passengers so much, but because the original two-car trains needed to be upgraded to three car D2007 trains which were nearly double the dry weight - and would have killed the Victorian-era viaducts the DLR ran over
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Washington DC Metro and San Francisco BART are very similar systems and were designed from the outset for fully automatic operation.
I still don't see why this should be a problem. As the article pointed out the London Underground operates flawlessly in this regard. There's a mix of trains there. All trains can be manually driven. Some lines are now pretty much fully automatic with the driver only required to press the button to start the trip to the next station.
Neither manual not automatic operation seems
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More importantly, each train had its own "personality" and handled differently, and all of them would take between one and two seconds to respond after an input was commanded except for E-stops, which instantly opened the relay contactors and applied air to the friction brakes.
Don't we have machine learning and adaptive control for that? These things should still be easier for a computer than for a human. Even momentary weight estimates could work based on the most recent history of acceleration and engine power. You shouldn't even need full automatic control; If you absolutely need humans in control, you could still give them semi-auto modes. Apollo LEMs had those in 1969 already. Why does it have to be full-auto or full-manual?
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I'm not disagreeing with you. I didn't design the train control system.
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Our trains had a pair of tachometers that measured speed, along with fixed transponders every thousand feet or so along the beamway. Between the tachs and the transponders, the train could figure out where it w
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Using 30 year old technology and corrupt maintenance supervision.
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No, the key is not ignoring the sensor failures. The "Tube" is also not without incident, though nothing fatal since 1975 - which is pretty darned good. Nor is the completely-manual (even the doors!) New York subway.
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the London Underground is also manual. The only automatic bit is the drive system, and even that is overseen by a human driver.
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yes we think it WILL work just fine in cars, we don't think it DOES work just fine in cars currently..
Old technology (Score:2)
As MightyYar said, that's going by 30 year old technology for the train automation. Also very few people think that self-driving cars are ready today, more like 5-10 years in the future, minimum.
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The main controls on a train are to go forward and backward. Hardly something that needs advanced artificial intelligence and 3D spacial comprehension. It is basically a one dimensional problem when operating a train, and monitoring the rails to make sure that one dimension situation doesn't change into a 3D problem. Sure, there is monitoring the equipment on the train itself where the motors are far more complex, but even that has its limits and isn't too complicated.
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I suspect what Jmstuckman meant was that the controls were not intuitive to humans, or have a range of control that is awkward. In other words, imagine that the gas pedal on your car had 1 mm of travel and you had to manually set 3 different interlocks to change to reverse gear, and you had a significantly obstructed viewpoint, since it was only meant for automated control. Then you too would have a hard time with the simple 1-dimensional control as well. Getting within a foot of the platform target woul
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I'm picturing it like driving a car designed for power steering and brakes, with both out. Its even harder than for a car designed without those features to begin with because the car without was designed to work well woithout the systwm. With it they only expect it to be operated that way in an emergency, thus 'close enough' is seen as acceptable.
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I suspect what Jmstuckman meant was that the controls were not intuitive to humans, or have a range of control that is awkward. In other words, imagine that the gas pedal on your car had 1 mm of travel
I have driven trains. They have massive momentum, but feeble acceleration and braking. Make a normal brake application at full speed and nothing seems to happen for a while. Driving them is quite a knack, nothing like driving a car, and you need to be familiar with what is still out of sight ahead. I think that a human taking over from auto will do poorly because, as the train is in usually auto, they are simply out of practice.
Incidentally, the train (electric ones at least that I have driven) might
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brakepoints on curved lines: not simply a suggestion, you ignore those at your peril.
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I was mainly responding to the presumption that somehow self-driving automobiles are somehow technologically equivalent to automated trains. Doing stuff like Google is doing with self-driving cars is far more complex due to the need to evaluate your position on the road, varying kind of pavement, working in conjunction with other vehicles of multiple sizes that are also moving mere feet away, and requires that 3D spatial recognition that is not trivial to create a computational model to deal with potential
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Agreed, driving on rails is inherently simpler in automated or manually-controlled conditions compared to cars. Quite frankly, it is amazing that people manage to navigate their cars at all. On the other hand, rails can be so simplified that people potentially don't maintain sufficient attention to the situation. Duality of mankind? We need enough hazards to maintain appropriate vigilance to the current situation?
I'm optimistic in the long run that automated cars will actually do a pretty good job compa
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This is actually why I like to drive a manual transmission, because it keeps me awake longer on a long-haul drive. This was something originally pointed out to me by a bus driver, who noted that the bus company refused to put automatic transmissions into their buses at the time explicitly to keep the minds of the drivers engaged in the operation of the vehicle instead of other distractions. I also find that a manual transmission give me both a better feel of the road conditions, and more options to apply
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That technology is remarkably old, and hardly reliable by modern standards.
The old system would apparently not detect trains in some regions due to sensor failures. With such a small number of trains, a computer-controlled system would simply keep track of all of them and if one didn't check in it would assume the worst and fail safe.
Now, keeping track of every car in the US centrally isn't as practical, but you could still have a system where the absence of information is detectable. Aircraft are managed
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No. The old system was perfectly reliable except in certain slippery weather conditions. WMATA was in the process of replacing the old system with a new system from a different vendor. In the process they mismatched sensors with lineside equipment. The result was death and injury.
Please read the depositions. It reveals much more than most news reports say, with the possible exception of certain Washington Post articles.
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Trains and cars are so different in practically every way that trying to compare them, and how their automated operations would work, is useless.
Just the fact that automated cars have to be designed to deal with many various forms of traffic, and do not run on tracks, means the train automation was designed without many of the considerations and safeguards that are a minimum in automated cars.
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And when were those subways built again? The New York subway opened in 1904, the DC metro in 1974, BART (SF Bay Area) in 1972. And the latter two systems were designed for total automation* from the beginning!
And don't say Beijing's opened in 1969, it's technically true but 15/17 lines were built after 2002.
*BART has operators only because of transit union activism and an isolated, pre-opening incident known as the 'Fremont flyer.'
London underground has automatic trains (Score:5, Funny)
For example the central line has been automated since the 90s. Drivers there just to go on strike
Re:London underground has automatic trains (Score:4)
For example the central line has been automated since the 90s. Drivers there just to go on strike
+1 internets. So true.
Though in actual fact the drivers do serve some other purposes. Parts of the subsurface system (Central, District, Metropolitan, Hammersmith and City) are open to the air or just plain above ground. The drivers are needed in case there are unexpected obstructions on the line. Also, since none of the stations are designed for it (unlike the new metro line in Paris), the drivers are needed to make sure that the train is safe to leave and no passengers are stuck in the doors and so on.
The other, important purpose it to make sarcastic announcements when the train gets stuck at a signal, which is something they do excel at.
DLR (Score:2)
The drivers are needed in case there are unexpected obstructions on the line.
If that were correct how would the Docklands Light Railway operate above ground without any drivers at all? The sad reason that drivers are needed is because of the unions. They automated the Victoria line years ago (1960s) but the unions threatened action and the resulting chaos that a drivers strike would have caused on the lines which were not automated forced them to keep drivers on each train even though they are completed unnecessary.
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If that were correct how would the Docklands Light Railway operate above ground without any drivers at all?
You are right in part: the late and IMO not lamented Bob Crow has been responsible for a lot of stupidness by running that union.
However, the subsurface lines share infrastructure with the surburban railways, whereas the DLR is essentially a closed system.
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DLR operates without drivers because it isn't subject to london transport rules that say that a train shall be manned at its head at all times. Most DLR carriages do, however, carry what are referred to as train captains, who have key access to control panels at either end in case they're needed (they also control the doors but normally the SELTRAC system controls the drive system subject to door safety interlocks engaging).
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The NYC system has this semi-automatic. They have about 5 different announcements claiming conditions like "held for train traffic ahead", "held by the dispatcher", etc, all recorded by the "50s announcer guy" ("You may know me from such announcements as 'The White Zone is for Loading and Unloading Only, No Parking'"). When the train is stopped for any reason, the driv
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the drivers are needed to make sure that the train is safe to leave and no passengers are stuck in the doors and so on.
Depending on the size of your trains, these things are best done by a bunch of cameras keeping an eye on the full length of the train, obstruction detectors in the doors themselves, and platform staff. The cameras can be watched from a central location (could be central to the city, the line or to the station) with one person watching the complete train and keeping an eye on the crowds on the platform, while the obstruction detectors can give off an alarm to the automatic train control system and/or the sta
Crash not computer-related (Score:5, Informative)
The Red Line crash was not computer-related. The signalling system for the Washington Metro is a classic electromechanical relay-based system. Just like the New York subways. The Red Line crash was caused by a failure of a track circuit for detecting trains, trackside equipment using an audio-frequency signal sent through the rails and shorted to the other rail by the train's wheels. [ntsb.gov] All those components are pre-computer technology.
As with most railway systems, manual driving isn't enough to prevent collisions, because stopping distances are often longer than visual distances. That was the case here.
The Washington Metro had been sloppy about maintenance of trackside equipment. They do have a central computer system, and it logs what the relay-based signal systems are doing, although it can't override them. They had logs of previous failures, and should have fixed the problem.
Re:Crash not computer-related (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, one of the trains involved in the crash was being operated in manual mode rather than automatic mode, contrary to policy at the time. Though unrelated to the underlying failure of the track circuits, one of the immediate causes for the collision happening at that failed circuit was that the train in manual mode had been moving slower than normal automatic trains would normally move across it.
Basically, the regular speed commanded by the automated system on that track is 55mph. When crossing the faulty circuit, the speed command becomes 0 and the train slows (but does not trigger emergency braking). For automatic trains, before the train came to a stop, momentum had already carried it forward into a working circuit and resumed normal speed commands. In the 2009 crash, the struck train was being manually operated below 55mph. Because of this it took less distance for the operator to respond to the 0 command and stop the train. The train came to a stop entirely within the faulty circuit and became effectively "invisible." The train behind it was commanded by the system to proceed at 55mph and didn't have time to slow very much once the stopped train came into view and the emergency brake was activated.
(Even if the collision had not happened at this spot, the underlying cause was completely overlooked by Metro and a collision would have happened eventually - perhaps more severely, if in a tunnel, or less severely, if on straight track with a long visual distance for emergency braking. The same failure happened in a tunnel in 2005, almost resulting in a collision, but Metro failed to fully investigate and understand why the problem happened.)
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No. Both trains involved in the crash were in automatic mode. The only time in manual mode was when the unfortunate soul operating the striking train applied the emergency brake.
what's wrong with the Metro drivers? (Score:2)
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They still have to announce it manually? CTA's had automatic announcements as long as I've known.
Also, blame shitty audio equipment first. The actual CTA stations have such horrible speakers it's impossible to know what's being said.
Re: what's wrong with the Metro drivers? (Score:2)
Re: unintelligible drivers (Score:2)
No... I really can't blame this on the PA equipment. I agree that at times it's not the best (some metro cars have a blown or intermittently working speaker). But the OP is correct. The majority of metro drivers just mumble the names of the stops. It's actually almost a shocking change when I get a driver who is well spoken, who choose to speak a little bit more than just some garbled version of the name of the next stop. When that happens, you can hear them perfectly over the PA.
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London's Docklands Light Railway is automated (Score:2)
While the traditional London Underground has drivers, that's pretty much just because the powerful union in charge won't let them be upgraded to be driverless. We've had reliable, safe driverless trains for over 25 years on the 45-station Docklands Light Railway in the East of London.
Re:London's Docklands Light Railway is automated (Score:5, Informative)
None of the Underground lines are driverless. The ones you list are GoA level 2 (i.e., opening/closing doors, starting the train, and emergencies are handled by the driver). Go look in the cab of any of them, they all have drivers!
Even the DLR is a GoA level 3 system, as the "attendant" handles door closing and emergency driving of the system.
The only GoA level 4 systems (which are truly driverless and can operate without any trained staff onboard) in the UK are the people movers at Heathrow T5, Gatwick, and Stansted.
Are you asking or telling? (Score:2)
That never happens on the London underground with human operators?
Are you asking a question or making a statement? Hello, editors?
Now however replacement of 'faulty' modules
Is that what they call human drivers now?
What's wrong with American drivers? (Score:2)
Americans.
Had to be said :)
never happens on the London underground (Score:2)
That never happens on the London underground
Neither it does on Paris' underground lines, whether automatic or not
When I lived in Japan and rode trains every day (Score:3)
I always wondered why they had drivers. How hard is it to start and stop a train? I asked one of my Japanese coworkers why he thinks they have drivers, what with all the technology in Japan and all, and his reply was very insightful: "they have drivers so they can blame/fire someone if something goes wrong".
THAT is why trains have drivers.
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No. They have operators who operate the doors and ensure the train does not leave the station with someone hanging out of a door, or other kind of emergency situation.
Are we having a serious conversation here? If not, I'll bail out now.
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Are you suggesting they can't detect when someone is preventing a door from closing completely by any means other than a person looking?
Interterminal trains in airports all over the world operate without human operators.
Did you know that automatically flushing urinals use sensors that detect the presence of someone standing in front of them and then flush when that person has moved away? No, it isn't a camera with someone on the other end paid to watch you pee and then flush for you when you're done- (well
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There certainly is an interlock that prevents the train from leaving the station unless all doors are closed. The automatic system takes this as a cue to release the brakes and depart the station
As built, the system was supposed to have automatic doors that would open like elevators if someone got in the way. This made operations difficult so the doors now just keep trying to close like every other system.
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An obstruction interlock can certainly detect an arm or a leg, but if you set it sensitive enough to detect loose fabric (say, a scarf or a hanging sleeve), it'll be sensitive enough that thermal expansion will cause false positives and negatives.
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The MTA recently cut the number of station staff. If they didn't have anybody on the train, they just wouldn't have enough employees around to mind the shop during normal operations. I mean, you need a human being with a radio down there.
Right, but they belong in the station, not on the train. The train's doors should be physically incapable of opening why the train is in motion, which would solve that particular problem.
Cutting the station staff is a bad idea, mmkay?
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some of them are set to do that for people who have "shy" kidneys. I don't know why, but for many people hearing the sound of running water is an inducement to urinate. I've even seen people spitting into the urinal to get their flow going. Others sensors maybe were just never adjusted. Others may be broken. And you may make the argument that such things break down so the train would be less safe if it depended on sensors, but I would counter that with the fact that urinals flushing is not the same imp
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1. Japan values customer service. Having a face be there to control the train or open/close the doors makes the service "friendlier." Also, if they removed the staff and made it automatic the old people would complain.
2. "Its how its always been done so why should we change."
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What if someone jumped to the line, or fell in the line, would the automated system be able to see it and break?
What if the doors closed with someone coat on it and that person was being dragged by the metro? Would the automated system be able to detect that?
My point is that: 1 - Sensors and processing are st
The automatic system was fine, not the upgrade (Score:4, Informative)
The automatic system was fine for nearly 40 years. The upgrade process killed nine people and injured 80 and caused a safe system that ran reliably for nearly 40 years to run in "manual" mode for five years because of a maintenance error.
Several depositions from railroad workers who were tasked with upgrading Metro's nearly 40-year-old system mentioned a real problem. The signals were "bobbing." This happened because the older signal system was being replaced with a different vendor's technology in two phases with catastrophic results.
In phase one, the lineside signal cabinet equipment was replaced but the original track sensors were left. In other cases, it was reversed: the track sensors were replaced but the lineside signal cabinet equipment was original. In both cases the vendor was different and not totally compatible.
Naturally, as we would expect, the two different vendors' equipment was not interfacing perfectly. This caused signal "bobbing," where track occupancy would "bob" from red to green repeatedly. Trains would vanish from the system. Phantom trains would appear in the system.
This massive oversight reported in the depositions wasn't really taken seriously in the press nor by the accident investigation. From this point of view, the system failed due to incompatible equipment made to interface in order to save money and service disruptions. They didn't interface properly, and people died as a result. Nobody seems to care about what appears to be the real problem: incompatible vendors made to interface to save time and money.
But we now have faster trains with shorter headways that sometimes fail to stop at the correct spot in stations, so we have that going for us. At least the lineside cabinet equipment and track sensors are now from the same vendor, eliminating the problem that killed those people and put hundreds of thousands of others at risk for a couple of years until that deadly day in 2009.
The Copenhagen Metro (Score:2, Interesting)
In contrast, the Danish Copenhagen Metro went into operation late 2002. After extensive teething problems during the first years of operation, I was very surprised at just how well this driverless system now functions. Additionally, the design and architecture is extremely futuristic. The above ground sections linking the CBD with the airport are more reminiscent of scenes from Star-Trek. Though quite small (2 lines), it is currently undergoing a city-wide expansion phase. In cases of extreme winter weather
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I've only been on the Copenhagen subway once, but I remember that the stations did have glass walls between the platform and the rail, with doors matching the doors on the trains. Not much error margin or people could not get out or in, and the few stops I was on the train it stopped perfectly every time.
Nuremberg: fully automated subway, works. (Score:3)
I live in Nuremberg, Germany. 2 of 3 subway lines are fully automatic. They run much more often than with drivers, and this is actually MIXED operation: the third line, that is still driver operated, shares the tracks on the middle section through the city. Nuremberg was the first city to have such a mixed-mode subway.
They are on time for the most part, stop within a few cm of where they are supposed to each time, and are just a normal part of life. I've read about an occasional hiccup but never experienced one myself, and I don't think it's more than it would be in the "old system". The biggest stops were due to worker strikes, not technology issues. They didn't lay off anyone, by the way.
Anyway, it is just unexciting business as usual for me any more, nothing special.
Video (1min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
http://www.railway-technology.... [railway-technology.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... [wikipedia.org]
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Vancouver, BC, Canada has Skytrain, which is fully automated. No drivers on any of the cars at any time. They can be driven manually at the yards and in emergencies, but never as a part of normal operation. The system is so reliable that the biggest problem they have is people getting impatient with short delays and forcing the doors open to walk down the causeway to the next station. Then they have to shut off that section of tracks until everyone is off, which makes the delay much longer.
http://en.wikiped [wikipedia.org]
Londoner here... (Score:2)
Brakepoints (Score:2)
Since London Underground trains are all the same length, they're all pretty much the same weight (160 tonnes give or take twenty for passengers using the D78 stock electric units in trains of six cars). For the driver, this means that standing on the brake when you hit the brakepoint (or letting the e-brake take it when you hit the warning point) stops the train on the same spot every time: within a foot or two and ALWAYS behind the stopgate at the far end of the platform. Experienced commuters know where t
Posting to remove accidental moderation (Score:2)
This comment [slashdot.org] is actually interesting, not redundant...
Automatic subway train operation? (Score:2)
Tokyo was rolling that out when I wrapped my commercial duty tour in 1978. The recently finished Oedo Line, newest in the system, runs on linear induction motors. That means no more overhead network of catenaries to deliver power.
I'm glad this topic came up for discussion! (Score:2)
This is actually one of those things I thought about a lot while riding the red line metro to and from work each week.
I've noticed that among other things, there seem to be a couple of metro drivers who like to operate the trains at speeds as fast as possible between stops, rather than just pacing it more sensibly. They'll rapidly accelerate, headed westbound out of a station like the Bethesda or Friendship Heights location, only to wind up stopping in the middle of the track someplace before the White Flin
I need to call Metro.... (Score:2)
I relocated her in '09. This is the least friendly subway system I know of... and I lived in Philly, and Chicago, and am familiar somewhat with NYC, and a little with Boston's, and have even done the BART a couple of times.
For no known reason, they'll wait anywhere from 5 to 40 seconds *after* they come to a complete halt to open the doors. I presume this is some pseudo-Saftty thing (also, presumably dreamed up by someone who's never ridden a subway). Then they don't seem to be looking - it's close the door
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Is this the actual case?
No, except for the bit about it being underfunded and therefore not as well maintained as it should be. Which is a shame, because it's a fantastic piece of infrastructure, much nicer to ride than (say) most of the London Underground or the NYC Subway.
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much nicer to ride than (say) most of the London Underground
You mean you don't like the Northern Line at rush hour? Do you have some weird objection to having your face jammed into some giant's armpit for 30 minutes in 35 degree heat or something?
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Re: Thugs on the DC Metro? (Score:2)
Can't tell if real or sarcasm. Well played (or my sympathies) .
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A thug is a gang member, usually an enforcer or other low-level muscle, or someone who acts like one. . Just because Dick Sherman wants it purged as a code-word doesn't make it so.
Although the idea of avoiding the D.C. metro because it's full of thugs is pretty funny. Unless you include people who do legal violence as well as physical in "thug".
A DC resident replies (Score:5, Informative)
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Washington DC has a very strong and proud tradition of African-American railway workers. From the old railways to the RF&P to the Metro and also operating the premier Acela Express maintenance facility in Ivy City, Washington DC has a very successful and proud heritage of railway workers.
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I ran into this once, but with a different outcome. I was in college, on a date at the Outback Steakhouse, and a big fella was smoking in the restaurant, which was non-smoking. People were muttering, but no one directly said anything to him, probably because he was intimidating looking.
I went over to his table, and asked him to put his cigarette out because it was a non-smoking establishment. He looked me up and down, then took a long drag on his cigarette and blew it at me. When he put it back in his m
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Nothing's surprising about it. Doesn't stop people from being too scared to sit next to a black guy.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll sit next to whoever I like, people are more likely to be intimidated by me (6'8") than I by them.
Re: Thugs on the DC Metro? (Score:2)
Oh, you mean that their friends were literally talking about a certain ancient group of professional assassins that have commandeered the DC metro, but accidentally said the word "thugs" instead of Thugee? That explanation sure makes a lot of sense!
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What's wrong with American drivers? Well to begin with, they all drive like assholes.
American drivers drive like Americans!
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What's wrong with American drivers? Well to begin with, they all drive like assholes.
Now now, that's not really true. Many of them drive like idiots.
So far I've found the best drivers in the country to be from NY or CA. However, there are many shit drivers around places with a lot of money. Go figure. In the latter case you see it exemplied whilst passing through Marin. Always getting cut off by some dickwad in a Mercedes which doesn't even have plates yet.
Re:As a metro rider ... (Score:4, Informative)
There were a bunch of cases of 8 car trains being stopped by the driver as if they were a 6 car train. This left one car of people in the tunnel. It was decided that instead of relying on the train driver to remember how long of a train they are driving, all drivers would be required to pull up to the end. (The right decision IMO.)
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Re:As a metro rider ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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They know what they're driving: a train.
Contrary to say driving a truck or a car, the length of the vehicle doesn't change it's behaviour. So it's really easy for a driver to hop on a 8-coach train and drive it like a 6-coach train without feeling there's more behind him - maybe his train is normally a 6-coach vehicle, but as the normal train is in maintenance, they used an 8-coach one this time. With a truck you feel whether you're laden or not, whether you have that second trailer attached or not.
Once I'v
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Completely false!! You're thinking of an Amtrak crash caused by two stoned Conrail engineers. That has nothing to do with this conversation in any way.