Glen Labah  wrote:
> In article ,
>  "conklin"  wrote:
>
>> You are irrational once again.  If Metro-North needs to follow X, Y and Z
>> for safe transport of passengers, then freight RRs which carry oil need to
>> have track as good as Metro-North.  Or, are you saying that Metro-North
>> needs no new program because you say so?
>
>
> The mainline railroads already are doing these types of track
> inspections - or rather the Federal Railroad Administration does the
> inspections with its own cars:
>
> http://www.fra.dot.gov/Page/P0120
>
> In some cases the railroad companies have their own track inspection
> cars to do track inspection work, or they have other methods of doing
> this work.  The FRA is only supposed to verify their methods are working.
>
> About two years ago I attended a SoundTransit meeting where the expense
> of track inspection came up, and one of the contractors said the
> cheapest way of doing the regular track inspection was, rather than have
> a special track inspection car, to simply put the required equipment on
> some of the cars already operating in regular service.  They said they
> were already doing this on a few other commuter railroads.

I have a hard time believing that is correct. The equipment on a track
geometry car is expensive, so you want to maximize its utilization. On the
other hand, it requires several technicians to operate, so you don't want
to test the same piece of track over and over again several times a day.

As I said, "autonomous" systems like the ones mentioned in the press
release are probably not using lasers to measure track gauge, profile, and
cross-level. The ones used on freight locomotives are just a set of
accelerometers and a GPS, hooked up to a simple signal processor to look
for unusually high accelerations, hooked up to a cell phone to report such
events. Certain types of accelerations are somewhat predictive of rail or
track problems generally, but a follow-up visual inspection is required
before you know what, if anything, is the issue.

On the other hand, one thing that the FRA HAS experimented with is putting
one of their geometry cars on the tail end of revenue passenger trains,
instead of running it as a separate train. This is cheaper, gives a higher
utilization, and avoids the operational problems of finding locomotives,
crews, and an open slot for another high-priority train running at
passenger speeds. The disadvantage is that you only go where the passenger
train goes - you don't get to decide (or even know ahead of time) which
tracks will be tested, you can't stop and field-verify an unexpectedly
severe defect, etc.

There is also a liability and / or regulatory issue with operating this
way. The FRA normally requires any federal track defect to be protected as
soon as it is discovered (usually with a slow order). When a geo car runs
as a separate train during daylight hours with plenty of advance warning,
the necessary maintenance personnel can be made available both in the car
and on the ground to ensure that happens. On long-distance Amtrak routes,
where the car may come through at night and doesn't necessarily stop at the
edge of each maintenance supervisor's territory, that's harder to
accomplish. In my experience, the FRA will give some waivers to help
alleviate this problem (e.g. 24 hours to inspect and protect), but there is
still a big liability concern if a geo car has reported a problem and you
haven't done anything to protect it.

Dan

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