When a railroad almost built a PTC system

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Last edited Thu Nov 12, 2015, 01:29 PM - Edit history (5)

I thought I had posted this last week or two weeks ago. I had not. Here it is.

When a railroad almost built a PTC system

A quick history of Burlington Northern and 'ARES'

By Forrest Van Schwartz | September 26, 2014

Since the early years of railroading, as soon as railroads started to run more than one train at the same time on the same segment of track, the industry has sought various means and technologies to prevent trains from running into each other. Various “control systems” evolved over the decades; most were good, some not so good.

In the early 1980s, one idea for increasing safety (and savings) came from Richard Bressler, Burlington Northern’s chairman and chief executive. He had a long career in the oil industry and became fascinated with new technology developed by the U.S. military: the global positioning system. He approved a team to look for a project using GPS and the vastly improved computer systems available by the mid-1980s.

That team’s efforts led to a project to replace the signal and communications pole line on a former Great Northern route extending west from the Lake Superior ports of Duluth, Minn., and Superior, Wis.

Originally, BN partnered with two other Class I railroads to advance the train-control project, but eventually shouldered the responsibility alone for what became known as the Advanced Railroad Electronics System, or ARES. Information was provided to train crews via radio links to in-cab displays as well as to train dispatchers at the central offices.
....

Veteran locomotive engineers, who knew every inch of their territory, grew to trust and rely on the in-cab displays. Train dispatchers liked the greatly improved voice radio communications and the speed at which switch and signal instructions were sent to field locations.

Same story, picked up over a year later:

U.S.

Rail Industry Had Safety Technology Decades Ago

By RON NIXON NOV. 3, 2015

WASHINGTON — In 1981, while traveling on a corporate jet, Richard M. Bressler, the chairman of the Burlington Northern Railroad, hit on an idea: What if the technology used by airlines to track the location of planes and help prevent accidents was applied to the rail industry?

Mr. Bressler, an engineer by training and a former airline executive, directed a small group of his employees to come up with a similar system for the railroads. The result was a safety system called the Advanced Railroad Electronics System, or ARES, which was soon placed on several trains on a section of track in Minnesota. The system, among other safety features, allowed dispatchers to stop trains automatically if the engineer exceeded speed limits.

But after five years in operation, the project was abruptly shut down in 1993. The company cited the system’s expense and resistance from many managers who did not see how the benefits outweighed the cost of the technology. It calculated that it would have cost about $350 million to install the monitoring hardware and software on the railroad’s entire system, equal to about $580 million today.
....

The ARES system was rudimentary compared with the system the railroad industry is trying to install today, federal regulators say. Also, the older system was tested on only a few hundred miles of track with just a few trains, the regulators said, so it is not known how it would have worked in high-traffic areas like Chicago. Nevertheless, safety experts say the system proved that a technology to stop trains from colliding was feasible.

The article elaborates:

ARES was modeled after an air traffic control system then newly developed by Rockwell International for Boeing 757 and 767 jets.

In an interview, Mr. Bressler, 72, now retired and living in the Seattle area, said he had read about the system in a magazine. After finishing the article, he sent a note to senior managers asking, “Any application to locomotives?”

To oversee the project, the company hired Steve Ditmeyer, a former Federal Railroad Administration official. ... “I was just there a few weeks, and the note from Mr. Bressler landed on my desk,” Mr. Ditmeyer recalled in an interview. Some months later, after seeing a Jan. 22, 1982, advertisement in The Wall Street Journal promoting Rockwell’s “21st-century avionics for the new generation of jetliners,” he contacted the company.

“I just wrote to them out of the blue,” said Mr. Ditmeyer, who is now a transportation consultant in Virginia and an adjunct professor in the Railway Management Certificate Program at Michigan State University. The company agreed to give it a try.

Full disclosure: I own shares of rail companies, but this ownership is not in conflict with my interest in rail safety. Also, I've attended a meeting at which Steven Ditmeyer delivered an address. I'm looking at his business card right now.