“Those unseen, broken bolts in Mosier, Oregon, expose a significant flaw in the current system for railroad inspections. Yet, federal and state regulators, as well as the railroads, all say current rules are adequate. Minimum federal requirements allow railroads considerable leeway for how they inspect their own track, while government checks are few and far between. As Mosier showed, the system can allow potentially dangerous defects to go unaddressed for months.”
According to the article, inspection and detection is done from a slow-moving vehicle. It’s a visual inspection…in the 21st century.
There are all sorts of rather simple technology solutions to employ, e.g. barcodes/QR codes to mark when a part has been replaced (or needs to be replaced based on age), image detection to look for anomalies, radar or sonics to look for flaws, etc. If nothing else, to at least augment a visual detection?
And another thing: our infrastructure is 100 years old, for Pete’s sake. We need people to stand up and say “enough is enough” already. We have to rebuild our infrastructure and use our latest technologies. The civil engineers have been saying this for 30 years, and the politicians don’t listen because it’s not something to get them re-elected.
Automated track inspection systems exist and are in use.[1][2] Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern even have some of their inspection systems. They're much faster than driving along at 10MPH trying to see the problem visually. There are even inspection systems that are built into a freight car, so you just couple it into a train and get back a track report.
Maybe they don't like using them. Because they're going to log every track flaw.
When train lengths are miles long, how else could you practically do it?
The industry is clearly structured around anti-inspection. Inspecting 3 miles worth of traincars just so one single train can leave is kind of crazy to think about. It's a difficult problem to definitively solve unless you want to spend shitpiles of money to innovate new inspection hardware/software.
Shortening trains seems like an obvious solution, but do we have the capacity for that? When was the last new freight railroad laid in the US? What are the logistical problems?
https://www.opb.org/news/series/oil-trains/how-inspectors-mi...
“Those unseen, broken bolts in Mosier, Oregon, expose a significant flaw in the current system for railroad inspections. Yet, federal and state regulators, as well as the railroads, all say current rules are adequate. Minimum federal requirements allow railroads considerable leeway for how they inspect their own track, while government checks are few and far between. As Mosier showed, the system can allow potentially dangerous defects to go unaddressed for months.”
According to the article, inspection and detection is done from a slow-moving vehicle. It’s a visual inspection…in the 21st century.
There are all sorts of rather simple technology solutions to employ, e.g. barcodes/QR codes to mark when a part has been replaced (or needs to be replaced based on age), image detection to look for anomalies, radar or sonics to look for flaws, etc. If nothing else, to at least augment a visual detection?
And another thing: our infrastructure is 100 years old, for Pete’s sake. We need people to stand up and say “enough is enough” already. We have to rebuild our infrastructure and use our latest technologies. The civil engineers have been saying this for 30 years, and the politicians don’t listen because it’s not something to get them re-elected.