Picking up speed

Here is an interesting article from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette of September 14th 2005. This is just one example of technology that is being implemented here in Pittsburgh.

Our late mayor, Don Eaton, was a proponent of commuter rail service into Pittsburgh and was trying to get the community interested at the time of his death. It is a shame that people sit in choked traffic arteries in cars and buses while a direct rail line sits mostly unused.


Picking Up Speed
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
By Jim McKay, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Union Switch & Signal Chief Executive Officer Ken Burk is making a big bet that the Pittsburgh railroad products company can boost the average speed of the nation's largest freight railroad by 2 to 4 mph.
If that doesn't sound so fast, consider that a 1 mph increase in average train speed can save large railroads such as Union Pacific Corp. an estimated $200 million a year. By moving product just a little quicker over long distances with the same number of trains and crews, the effective number of workers and locomotives per mile falls, generating huge efficiencies.

Union Switch recently signed a contract to design and maintain a rail dispatching system for Union Pacific that aims to help do just that. The technology, initially developed some 10 years ago with a Carnegie Mellon University research team and refined since then, is designed to give railroads "real time" information on train movements and help automatically route traffic around problem areas such as impassable tracks.
It's a complicated problem that involves multiple agents -- or autonomous pieces of software -- that incorporate decision-making programs, memory and the ability for trains, crews and rail traffic controllers to communicate with each other. "It's basically a more difficult and complex problem than air traffic control" because planes "can fly around a problem," Burk said. "On rail, you are fixed onto the track."

Follow this link for complete story.