The equipment package cited had full connectivity to the locomotive and would notified the engineer of the hot bearings 40 miles ahead of the derail location. The ECP brakes would have stopped the train in 2/3rds of the braking distance of a convention airbrake system. The anglecock/handbrake/cutlever automation had the ability to immobilize the problem cars, close the air brake lines and pop the cut levers to isolate the cars in trouble.
All that nifty capability was terminated the morning after Obama was inaugurated on Jan 20, 2009. I had to call 46 vendors working on the project with a "stop work" notification and ultimately all of the $1 million in research cars were abandoned in the yard. The cars also had a special DHS tracker to track chain of custody for containers from ship to truck to rail to storage yard. That was lost too. I was graciously allowed $100 to package up the $50,000 in special programming interfaces, CAN bus controllers, CAN software generation tools and specialized libraries for passing data durably over the mesh network. It was OBAMA who scuttled the program. My research caboose was Norfolk Southern property. The instrumented coal cars were owned by a private party, but run by Norfolk Southern between Alabama and Power River, WY coal mines.
YOU are the man.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. I just want to make sure I understand fully, what you’re saying. You worked on a contract to implement, on a small scale, the safety features you described, in order to test their feasibility/effectiveness, and the project was cancelled when Obama took office?
Myrddin,
Groundbreaking information! I recommend you send this to Steve Bannon’s Warroom. He will be all over this and will help disseminate this information.
IT NEEDS TO GET OUT!
Thank you, patriot.