How to get to 'fail proof'

Safety is trending. Public pressure and the desire for votes will eventually encourage Congress, whether right or wrong, to mandate more safety measures for railroads. Congress and the media will not learn from the current debacle of Positive Train Control (PTC). For some reason, the media and Congress think that railroads are a technology that they understand completely. What's not to understand? You can buy a little eighth-inch-to-the-foot model and get it to run on plastic and metal tracks. You don't even have to steer it, do you? And you don't have to understand the engineering that keeps it on the tracks.

Congress doesn't understand the technology involved in keeping a modern Max airliner in the air, so regulations for airlines aren't a favorite target. Automobiles will soon break that same tech barrier, and legislators will shrug and try to devise more regulations for the tech they think they do understand.

So much for today's rant. The question is: How do we get to fail-proof railroads? I contend that, since railroads are a human invention, and human

s are imperfect, the only way to get perfectly safe railroads is to tear them all down and let computers devise a self-guiding, heavy-duty freight and passenger system from the ground up.

I can suggest some parameters.

1. The ground on which these new trains operate must be either elevated above all other ground-based traffic (vehicle and pedestrian) or tunnelled below. Even then, there must be some perfectly safe way to prevent people from climbing the embankments or entering the tunnels. Perhaps something that simply puts them to sleep if they get too close. We can hire Ubers to pick up the sleeping trespasser-wannabes and deposit them in soft cocoons until they wake up, all expenses charged to the credit chips embedded under the skin in their (name body part)s.

Perhaps you can see where these parameters are leading, but here's another.

2. The tracks, or whatever guideways are devised by the designing computers, must be made of materials that won't expand, shrink, crack or break. They can't bend under the weight of cars or locomotives or whatever vehicles are designed. They must be conductive, to accomodate signal systems, but they must be made of lightweight materials to reduce costs. These materials must not create any pollutants, particularly greenhouse gases, either in their manufacture or in their ultimate disposal when their useful life is reached.

And we haven't even gotten to the actual trains yet, so to keep this post short, we'll talk more about fail-proof trains next time.

© 2019 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com