Quote:
Originally Posted by WallShadow
In all the discussion of getting trains back onto the tracks, I have seen little or no discussion of a vital aspect of running the rails--signals and switches. Modern railway has become entangled with sensors and remote controls and other electronic goodies; EMP damage was mentioned in passing but what does that damage _mean_? It means that highballers will need to be sure of the position of every switch they cross. So outriders or scouts would need to be ahead of the train to verify or change the setting of each switch in their path. And if they run through something like the Enola, PA switching yard, they will definitely have their hands full.
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Its not as bad as you might think. In the mid-90's a lot of the hardware that was used to actually control traffic was electro-mechanical, and very resistant to EMP effects. All the high tech doodads are pretty much a product of the last 15 years - and even now, are not in total use. Positive Train Control for example is something that was looked at in the mid 90's to be sure, but its still over a decade from fielding. Signalling in the mid 90's wasn't much better than the most basic of electrical circuits. Yes, computer traffic control centres was being introduced in the 90's, but they wasn't widespread, and the vast majority of the railroad workers was still trained up on systems that date back to the 40's and 50's. Which isn't much better than slips of paper being passed around.
Seriously.
Up until the late 80's early 90's, traffic on the railroads was handled by basic telephone coms between blocks, with info being passed to trains by a combination of lights displayed at the blockhouses, and pieces of paper held out a window for the passing train to grab on the way by.
Into the 70's, a lot of roads used timetable and train order systems: Basically, Train X, has seniority over Y, as long as it was rolling according to schedule, with a series of if-then's built in if it wasn't.
All these are more manpower intensive than the late 90 to today's systems, which is why they moved to other less intensive operations. But, in the late 90's, with war on the horizon, railroads would have moved to ensure that they would be ready for issues. After all, the railroads have memories when it comes to what happens when war comes: they had barely recovered from the damage done by nationalisation by the US government during WW1 when the depression/WW2 twofor got them. To this day, the railroads have very thick contingency plans for wartime: all with the efforts to A: Deliver the goods, and B: not get nationalised in the name of 'government managed efficiencies and mandates'.
In fairness, I don't blame them in the least. President Wilson was big believer in progressive politics, and felt that big business (And in the first two decades of the 20th, none was as big as the railroads) was drag on the economy, and that it would be more... equitable, and fairer, if government employes, who would be much better at running such business, took over. He used the storm clouds of WW1 to do just that to the Railroad companies, and mandated not just what prices they could charge, regardless of costs, but what sorts of trains, to where, and when - even the style of engines and hardware was all decided in DC. It *destroyed* the railroad infrastructure to the point that in the 20's, the government was forced to let loose the strings on the RR's. But only loosened those strings: till the 70's there railroads still had to get permission from DC to build or abandon lines, change the prices they could charge, buy equipment, hire and fire, or even merge/purchase other companies.
So... back on point, the Railroads are probably the one part of the US that is more than prepared for anything - they have long, and very bad, memories of when they wasn't!