Keeping The Trains
Rolling With Computers
After running for many years on equipment designed in the first half of this century, the railroad industry is now beginning to use computers to dispatch and control trains. The industry’s main objectives in using computers are to improve safety, cut maintenance costs, save fuel, and more efficiently use its 221,000 miles of track and 1,3 million freight cars. Currently, most railroads use a system of in-track sensors and radio transmitters to track the trains. This system has an accuracy of about 3 miles, which means that, for safety’s sake, dispatchers have to give each train a 6-mile cushion. This causes trains to run more slowly than needed, wait at sidetracks for long periods, and, in general, run very inefficiently.
Consider the system being tested by Burlington Northern on 250 miles of its track. Custom-designed computer chips are installed on the test locomotives, which communicate with the air force’s Global Position System (GPS) satellites to determine the exact location of a given
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train. The location of the locomotive is sent to a minicomputer used by the dispatchers.
This new system can determine the locomotive’s location to within 150 feet, allowing Burlington Northern to operate its trains more frequently and get them to their destinations more quickly. During the last period, the company determined that installing the computer system in all its locomotives would have prevented all accidents that occurred on the railroad. Most such accidents were cause when trains exceeded normal speeds and ran through signals. Burlington Northern has decided to install the computer system in all its trains and expects a $1 billion payoff over a 15-year period.
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