01-22-2019, 12:53 PM
(01-22-2019, 11:01 AM)plam Wrote:(01-22-2019, 10:34 AM)Spokes Wrote: Are they the exact same as other railway crossing equipment?
Nope, the FIEs talk to them... Of course they are also still subject to mechanical failure as well as the novel software failure mode that we get in 2019.
(On balance it is probably good that they have software. But it complicates things.)
Software should have nothing to do with whether they go up and down reliably. The software can reasonably do things like tell the crossings to go down based on something more sophisticated than a track circuit, and it can report the status to the vehicles and to transit control, but I agree that we have existing, reliable, methods for actually controlling the motion. Those existing methods should not be replaced unless and until the new method is proven more reliable than the existing techniques.
A real difference that might be relevant is that we now have probably at least a couple of dozen new crossings installed all at once. How reliable are other new railway crossings? I have no idea.
What I want to know is how well the system does at telling transit control about problems. I would say that anytime a crossing arm remains down more than maybe a minute with no track circuits in the area indicating presence of a train, transit control should get an alert so they can monitor the situation and send out a repair crew promptly in the event it doesn’t clear by itself. It sounds like they might possibly have something like that — presumably the person Canard observed was dispatched that way.