China To Launch Self-Driving Bullet Trains That Will Travel At 217 MPH (independent.co.uk)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: China will introduce the world's first driverless trains to run at speeds of up to 217 mph (350 km/h) on the Beijing-Zhangjiakou railway line. The automatic operation bullet trains were trialled on a section of the Beijing-Shenyang line in 2018 by the China Railway Corporation (CRC) and the system passed all safety tests. "The bullet train can automatically depart, operate between stations and adjust the train's operation to meet its precise timetable after a single button is pressed," a researcher from China Academy of Railway Sciences told the Sciences and Technology Daily. A driver currently performs these operations on high-speed trains.

For the first 10 years of the high-speed ATO trains, an attendant will still be deployed on board to ensure nothing goes wrong. After that, the trains will be totally driverless. Experts say this should improve safety long-term. "An automatic driving system could greatly improve the safety of trains which run on high-speed railways, compared with human drivers who may have sudden health problems or disregard safety precautions during driving," Sun Zhang, a railway expert and professor at Shanghai Tongji University, told the Global Times. The Beijing-Zhangjiakou Line is currently being constructed for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, "to enable easy travel between Beijing and the Winter Olympic Village in 50 minutes," the report says.

Comments

Self-driving is actually not that impressive

[h33t l4x0r]

When you're a train.

Re:Self-driving is actually not that impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, if they get this even half-right, it'll probably be a step up in terms of safety. But, then again, this is the same China that had cracks appearing in the trackbed before the train even opened, so who knows.

IMHO, the big benefit here is not being constrained by line of site and reaction time. You can have a sensor down the tracks to indicate whether or not the tracks are clear. There's always going to be some risk in that regards due to stopping distance, but it would cut down on cases where you could have stopped given sufficient warning and a fast enough reaction time.

Re: Self-driving is actually not that impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Drivers and Conductors are two different jobs.

Re:Self-driving is actually not that impressive

[MightyYar]

One of the nice things about freeing up the salary spent on an engineer is you could choose to spend it on a cop, or likely 2.

Okay, slow clap?

[Trailer Trash]

I remember a year ago when this happened:

https://www.insurancejournal.c...

"The train was traveling 78 miles (126 kilometers) an hour when it hit a curve near DuPont, Washington, where the speed limit was 30 miles an hour."

My first thought was "why in 2018 do engineers still drive trains?" Seriously. Why is there a human involved in constantly changing the speed of the train - which is literally a complete job description. Set the speed. That's it.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be a human, and I think it's silly to remove humans from the equation simply because they're such a tiny cost and worth it.

Airplane manufacturers figured this out decades ago with autopilot. You have a pilot who does the hard stuff like taking off and landing, but for normal flying around at cruising altitude the plane flies itself. If the plane hits a rough patch or whatever the pilot will take over.

Driving a train in one dimension is much, much, (imagine about a thousand more "much"s) easier than flying a plane in three dimensions. Especially with GPS. It should be the case that a human drives the train one time on the route, his speed adjustments are noted 10 times a second or whatever, and then the computer simply does the same thing every time, setting the instantaneous speed based on location. Then, the human sits there and takes over if there's a person on the tracks or whatever.

Here's what I'm getting to. I'm literally baffled that this isn't normal. Seriously. How can someone even hit a cure at two and a half times the safe speed? This problem can be solved with hundred year old technology.

"NTSB investigators have said that an automated braking system known as Positive Train Control, which is required on railroads by the end of this year but wasn’t yet working on that section of track, would have prevented the accident."

Wow, you guys got right on that.

So, yeah, sorry to say I'm not real impressed with whatever China's doing there with "driverless train".