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Using GPS To Prevent Train Crashes In India
dave420 writes "The BBC has an article outlining plans in India to use GPS technology to alert train drivers of obstructions on the tracks, automatically stopping the train if the driver fails to take action. This sounds like a good use of cheaply-available technology to provide a safer train network."
The reason that GPS is not used in the US for trains more is because many times tracks run right next to each other and sometimes trains run on the right and other times on the left. GPS is not accurate enough to tell what track the train is on.
Indian Railways has over 62,000 route kms of track.
Indian Railways employs about 1.6 million people.
Carries over 11 million passengers & one million tonnes of freight everyday. (about 4.83 billion passengers and 492 million tons of freight per year)
It runs about 13,000 trains daily and has 6,984 railway stations.
The longest journey on Indian Railways is from Jammu Tawi to Kanyakumari, a distance of about 3,751 kms covered by Himsagar Express in about 66 hours.
Wont matter. Most professional GPS systems use a ground radio beacon. Given that you have a known point, the beacon sends out the corrected data back to you.
Sadly, just rebuilding the oldest parts of the railway wouldn't help with things like the 760km Konkan Railway down the west coast from Mumbai to Mangalore. The problem with the Konkan isn't that it's old, it's very new. Rather, the key issue is corruption.
If you don't check the contractors building the bridges, tunnels, cuttings, embankments, they WILL use 9 parts of sand to one of cement and bill as if they'd used 3:1. And they DID come up with a route running not inland as previously specified in the Indian Railways Engineering Code, but rather closer to the coast (through the swamps, the estuaries, the Western Ghats (mountains)), thus creating the need for hundreds of lucrative contracts for bridges, tunnels, cuttings and embankments, each of which yields a percentage in baksheesh, and each of which can then be built on the way-too-cheap once the full price for a proper job is in the bank.
The Konkan Railway thus loses USD3.5M per day and couldn't afford the planned new rolling stock, instead running aging rains at an average 50km/h instead of the promised 160km/h.
I was also surprised by the reference to "If the driver fails to do anything, then the brakes come on automatically within the next 30 seconds." as a novel contributor to safety.- I was under the impression that this device, a 'Dead Man's Handle' had been invented in the nineteenth century.
Which is not to say that I haven't had some great rides on the Konkan and met some very lovely people on the trains, because I have...
TomV
By the time the line opened on new years day 1998, there were already tens of miles of subsidence needing urgent repair.
Please read "Trains in Japan". Trains in Japan have been extremely reliable and clean since the 1950s -- almost half a century. In 1960, there was no GPS, no Internet, etc. Yet, the train system in Japan worked fine.
Japan is a smaller country.
Japan didn't have rail put in by the British
Japan has a much higher literacy rate
Japan's population have one common language. India's national language is English but that was only because it was the only common one educated Indians had.
Japan was high tech in the 1950. India simply was not.
Japan had western help to rebuild after the war
India was abondoned by the British some time ago, and part of Gandhi's dream was to bring literacy into India. He too felt there was no excuse for them living in 3rd world conditions. It's been a very slow going task.
Yes Europe is :) The system is called Galileo and you can find more information at the link. Slashdot also had a story.
The first satellites are supposed to be launched in 2004.
Yes.