British Rail Moving Forward with Sat-Nav/GPS

de1orean writes "The BBC is reporting that after a successful limited trial using GPS satellite navigation to improve train safety and efficiency, British Rail is committed to instituting sat-nav throughout the system. It may be in operation as early as 2008."

Comments

Low tech incompetence

[A nonymous Coward]

Why do fools insist on going to high tech solutions when they can't even get the low tech stuff right?

I have no personal experience with British rails, but I have read about the numerous nasty accidents they have had recently.

I do have experience with San Francisco's BART and the Tokyo subways about the same time, mid 1970s.

BART had fancy computer controlled trains which sometimes left the station without the operator in the cab. They actually stopped correctly at the next station, usually, but sometimes the trains stopped past the station, or shot off the end of the rails for the last station, and sometimes they opened doors on the wrong side of the train, right over the third rail. They were having one heck of a time even running the trains as close as 5 minutes apart.

Meanwhile, Tokyo's Ginza line, built just after the 1923 earthquake I believe, a completely manual system, had been running trains every minute or two without problems for years. That line was so funky that car lights would go off for a second or two as they crossed junctions; you could watch this light blanking travel down the train towards you.

Why do these idiots insist on spending a fortune on high tech solutions when low tech solutions have been around for a hundred years and yet they can't get it right, even with examples around the world of making them work? Is it just empire building?

Re:Low tech incompetence

[ozmanjusri]

Why do fools insist on going to high tech solutions when they can't even get the low tech stuff right?

Because they can't even get the low tech stuff right. The key failure points on rail systems are the switches & signals that control which section of rail the train is on, and the locomotives themselves which can stop, speed up or slow down.

Knowing precisely where a loco is on the track is the single most important aspect of rail safety, so that train control can switch a train onto another section of track, or into a siding to avoid collision, or can warn the driver to speed up or slow down to achieve the same result. In non-gps systems is this is done with trackside transponders and dead reckoning. A modern positive train separation (PTS) system based on GPS is simpler and more reliable than the transponders it replaces, and allows for more sophisticated controls such as automatic speed limiting.

It's also far from uncommon. Similar systems have been available for years.