From: stephen@sprunk.org

On 20-Apr-15 12:55, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
> Stephen Sprunk  wrote:
>> On 17-Apr-15 21:02, Michael Finfer wrote:
>>> One of the issues here is that SEPTA chose a PTC system that is
>>> incompatible with the one CSX will be using.  I am still shaking
>>> my head over that.  Interoperability was supposed to be one of
>>> the key features of operating a national system.
>>
>> There is no "national" PTC system; every railroad is developing
>> their own, and while at least some of them are supposed to be
>> interoperable, in practice that never turns out as well as
>> promised.  We also won't get the benefits of economy of scale that
>> way.
>
> What the hell does economy of scale have to do with anything?

Scale directly influences the marginal cost to produce equipment.

Reusing existing technologies, e.g. GSM-R, also reduces the time to
design and test said equipment, which indirectly influences cost and
leverages that other technology's economy of scale.

Developing a dozen different systems in parallel, none leveraging _any_
existing technologies, means a dozen times the development costs and
higher marginal cost of production.  That's just plain stupid.

> There are huge, expensive problems to overcome, like lack of radio
> spectrum capacity particularly in Chicago

Gosh, it's too bad there's not _already_ a widely-used, off-the-shelf
system developed to solve exactly that problem.  Oh wait, there is!

> and that FCC is way way behind on issuing licenses for all the new
> transmitters and relay stations,

Not surprising.  And that wouldn't be a problem if they had gone with
GSM-R, which (thanks to clever design) is capable of falling back to
using existing GSM networks if the GSM-R network isn't available.

> and the complete idiocy of the design that the entire railroad
> infrastructure plan must be downloaded into the locomotive
> each and every time the fucking consist changes direction because,
> you know, somebody installed a brand-new turnout in the last hour.

I've previously pointed out the idiocy of that decision, as well as
their decision to use GPS in general.

> It's one massively stupid fuckup. Economy of scale is mostly
> irrelevant.

It's one (of many) components of the fuckup, and it certainly won't be
irrelevant once they actually get to the deployment phase--and drag
their feet because it's too damn expensive to actually use.

ETCS isn't perfect, but the Europeans have been working out the issues,
and it would have cost a _lot_ less (both now and in the future) to join
in that effort than it'll cost us to repeat their mistakes--several
times--plus invent many new mistakes they avoided.

It's just like the stupidity of our CDMA/TDMA/iDEN war while the world
standardized on GSM.  Despite its flaws, GSM is far superior to all of
the US-developed systems _and_ costs less due to economy of scale, which
is why all US carriers are finally moving that way.

S

--
Stephen Sprunk         "God does not play dice."  --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723         "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS        dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking

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