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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."
Do the boulders have GPS too?
At present, drivers sit on hard wooden seats in cabins where temperatures often soar to an unbearable 56C.
The rest rooms provided for them often have no electricity and they have no recreational facilities.
They will also get cushioned seats in the engine room as well as a walkie-talkie to keep in touch with the station officials.
But it seems like they could have addressed some of these issues incrementally.
I could see where this could come in handy! The last thing ANY Indian would want to happen is to hit a cow wandering over the train tracks.
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.
What happens when the USA turns off or munges GPS information again? Is Europe still considering if they should make a secondary GPS system?
when the human is their to make sure the computer is being alert.
stuff
is bad tracks and bridges, rather than stationary objects on track. The only solution for that is to get rid of the British laid century old tracks and lay new ones.
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I wonder if this technology will evolve into technology to support automobile travel. There have been many attempts to develop technologies to allow for automated auto travel from laying copper wire for navigation systems to using object sensors in bumpers. Maybe GPS is the way to go! Of course, the BMW's of the world will get it first!
Having heard countless stories from most of my Indian pals over the years, I'm really curious how much of a difference this GPS plan will make. Sure, it's might be better than the way things are right now, but it seems that the transportation problems are endemic to society and thus not fixable (or even help-able) with something like GPS devices. And this isn't limited to just trains; there are apparently bus accidents all the time, too.
Having not been to India myself, I have to go with my second-hand knowledge and stories I hear, but it pretty much sounds like the Indian economy would never support the kinds of changes required to make mass transit actually safe. I'm interested to hear others' thoughts on this.
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But now, they can look forward to yoga classes, counselling for work as well as personal problems and air-conditioned rest rooms on long distance trips. While the GPS system drives the train?
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Yeah, but for any stolen or hijacked trains couldn't you just follow their tracks? :)
So the trains have a GPS doohicky in 'em, alright. And ya say that there doohicky can stop the train if the driver doesn't? Okeydokey.
And so you're sayin' I could sit next to the tracks and stop trains with the WiFi card in my Zaurus? Neat-o.
Saves having to follow the schedule!
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I have an idea for improving train safety.
The biggest problem for train safety is that a train is hard to stop. It has so much mass that you can't just suddenly decide to stop it. In a perfect world, you would have some warning before you needed to stop it.
So make a much smaller vehicle that can stop quickly, and have that run out ahead of the train! Call it the "point car". Sensors on the point car would watch for an obstruction on the tracks (such as a stalled truck) and would halt the point car quickly; the train would stop more slowly, but it would have enough warning that it could stop before it reached the point car, let alone the obstruction. Also, you could mount a video camera on the front of the point car, and the engineer driving the train could watch a live video feed. A wireless radio link is probably the best way for the point car and the train to communicate.
I'm sure the biggest problem with my idea is that it would cost too much. The point car would need fuel of some sort, and would itself be an expensive piece of equipment, and you would need one for each train. It would be cool if the point car could be driven by electric motors that somehow parasite power off the train, but I don't think any sort of power extension cord would be very practical.
And of course, if India is only now spending the money to put cushions in for engineers to sit on, they won't be the first ones to try point cars.
I don't know much about train crashes -- what fraction of train crashes are preventable with just GPS, and what fraction are not? If the most common problem is a train hitting another train, then GPS on both trains would help a lot. But GPS won't do much good if a truck stalls across the tracks.
steveha
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mod this parent up!
India's train engineers are notorious for braking fatally at the last minute because of a sacred cow on the tracks. While this may seem stupid to the rest of the word (and probably to the poor cow who merely wishes to die) the Indians are adamant that people should die to protect the cow. Knowing where the cows are seems very important if you value human life.
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.
Well, that sums up my thoughts after reading this article. Huh? GPS is really useful for a lot of things, and railroads use it to track there cars in the rail yard (with the help of radios which broadcast their location) and on the rails. And they can distinguish whether a car is on one track or the other if they have differential GPS set up.
As for collisions, it could help avoid crashes between 2 cars or between 1 car and a known obstruction, if they are using differential GPS to identify the track. Otherwise. I suppose if there's only one track, the railroads could use this info to prevent trains from colliding. Or if a bridge is out, the railroad could use software that gets the GPS info to alert the driver.
However, the article doesn't go into any details at all; maybe they'll just use it to identify conductors of recent accidents, which they could probably do just as well w/o GPS since the dispatchers know where the trains are anyways. Maybe this is just the easiest thing to implement with the GPS technology, and once it's in place, they'll expand. I wish the article had more info though, so I could spare everyone from my idle speculation.
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.
What in Indian culture prevents Indian society from developing into a modern society? Why does Indian society need all this high-tech intervention in order to make it just barely livable, yet Japan has been an adequately livable society since the late 1960s?
Amidst the bombard of vendors during the wait, at least I know now where to obtain a false passport.
While this does seem like a very practical, important, and just plain cool use of GPS, I do see the one big, ominous problem of the US jamming/degrading the GPS system in the event of another war. As well they should, but this could be leathal for this technology.
From gge.unb.ca:
The GPS Standard Positioning Service (SPS) uses the C/A-code component of the GPS L1 signal which is transmitted on 1575.42 MHz. The C/A-code, which stands for coarse/acquisition-code, is a pseudorandom noise code which the GPS receiver uses to determine the distance to a satellite. The distance is determined by aligning the received code with a replica of the code generated in the receiver. By measuring at least four such distances to different satellites simultaneously and knowing where the satellites are from the navigation messages they transmit, the receiver can figure out where it is. The C/A-code is a relatively short code which repeats every millisecond and a GPS receiver can easily lock onto or acquire it.
The military's GPS capability is known as the Precise Positioning Service (PPS). It relies on a much longer code called the P-code (for precise or precision) which is transmitted on both the L1 frequency and the L2 frequency at 1227.60 MHz. The P-code is encrypted (and it's then called the Y-code) so that it cannot be accessed by unauthorized users. Encryption also prevents a military GPS receiver from being fooled or spoofed by a fake GPS signal transmitted by an enemy. The encryption process is known as Anti-Spoofing. Military GPS receivers have decryption capabilities which permit them to recover the P-code.
Each satellite's unique P-code segment is one week long. In order to determine the distance to a satellite using the P-code, the receiver must align a replica of the code it generates with the arriving code.
Prior to 2 May 2000, the accuracy afforded users of the GPS Standard Positioning Service (SPS) was purposefully degraded through a policy and technique known as Selective Availability (SA). The use of SA gave military users of GPS a position accuracy advantage - one it did not wish to share with potential adversaries. SA was effected by manipulating or dithering the output of each GPS satellite's active atomic clock. This clock controls the generation of all of the satellite's signals and hence the measurements made by a GPS receiver. SA was imposed at a level which would yield a stated SPS horizontal (latitude and longitude) accuracy of 100 metres or better 95 percent of the time for any point in the world during a measurement interval of one day. On 2 May 2000, by presidential decree, the level of SA was set to zero. SPS users immediately saw a quantum jump in positioning accuracy with factors of 5 to 10 improvements. Even a simple handheld receiver can now often yield horizontal position accuracies of 5 metres.
Now remember, we've more or less been fighting 3rd world countries as far as their military capabilities go, so their use of GPS against us was highly unlikely. But say we go to war with a real military anytime soon. A country like China could sustain a global conflict for a while, and has the technology to make effective use of GPS against us. It wouldn't suprise me then if the (useful) SPS signal soon after the start of a conflict of that scope became non-exist.
So, back to the point of this, unless the US gives the Indian government military grade GPS gear, there could be a disaster waiting to happen. Granted, the chances are low, but still something to think about. But even given this, I personally think this should be a good model for other advanced railway systems to look at.
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A search for "GPS jammer" can be interesting for the bored.
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Talking about trains always reminds me of my uncle Earl. Back in the day Earl took his test to become a train conductor since he loved trains so much.
It got to the oral part of the test and the proctor asked Earl "You have a northbound train running at 38 MPH and a southbound train on the same track running at 42 MPH. The trains are 6 miles from each other. Who do you call first to report this to?
Earl perked right up "I'll call my nephew imag0, of course!"
The proctor was puzzled and asked "Why would would call your nephew?"
"'Cause he's never seen a trainwreck before!"
They are big steel wedges which smash the cow out of the way of the train, pulverizing it to death.
Somebody who considers cows sacred just might have a problem with this, and apply the breaks. That was the point the original poster was trying to make.
Is this also a bad time to tell you about the Easter Bunny?
I'm an Indian train driver, you insensitive clod!
The above post raises a good point. The problem I've experiences with Indian trains is the tendency of Indians to sing, dance, flirt, and generally arrange large musical dance numbers, all carried out on the rooftops of moving trains. The stations aren't much better, teary-eyed men are constantly watching their true loves head back to the village to get an arranged marriage to some brute.
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Sounds like a bit of a recipe for disaster to me. Do you have a lot of train crashes in the US?
Here in Australia, we have two parallel tracks throughout metropolitan Sydney (and, I presume, the same in other cities that have commuter trains). On the inter-city routes, most are served by a single track, but they use a physical token passing system to control who is allowed to be on any particular section of track at any given point in time. As the train passed from one section of track to another, they hand over the token for the section they've just left, and pick up a new one for the section they're entering. The crews are, obviously, quite proficient at passing this token (which is a serial-numbered/labelled piece of metal rod about 20cm long, and 1cm diameter, placed in a leather holder with a big metal ring for the actual transfer), they have to. If they miss the token, they have to stop the train and go back and get it!!! (They do have some devices to somewhat mechanise the actual token swap at some stations/in some cases, but it's still a very interactive process.)
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Yes of course it has to be made more accurate, and that's just what this professor at UCR's, Department of Electrical Engineering is working on. To quote what he says about it:
Global Positioning Systems: Accurate vehicle control requires reliable, accurate, high rate vehicle state information. We have developed and demonstrated a differential GPS/INS system to provide full six degree of freedom vehicle state information. Using GPS carrier phase and/or magnetometer measurements, we currently attain 2.5 cm. std. horizontal position accuracy. The INS provides the estimates at a higher rate (>150Hz) than the GPS itself is capable of providing. In addition, the INS maintains the vehicle state during brief periods of loss of GPS signal.
He also has some mpeg demo's available and also some reports (if you are really interested) on his home page (linked above).
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A friend of mine's father works for the railroad here in the US. High level position that oversee's all of the traffic throughout the east.
As I understand it, they use all sorts of radio networks and GPS systems to track where all the trains and cars are. They have advanced enough tracking that they know what locamotives are where, how many cars are hooked up to it, which track its on, and where its going.
While technology isn't going to stop someone from hitting a boulder, it can get information around and see who is near the area and avoid as much damage as possible. It is foolish to think we can protect ourselves from everything, but a step in the right direction is progress none the less.
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