Strategic Railroading

ACT NOW! Don’t wait any longer. This is your last chance opportunity to get PTC before the technicians take your railroad to the edge of the PTC investment abyss and give you the financially-fatal push.

The PTC approach being pursued by the Class Is via the Interoperable PTC Committee (ITC) manned by CSX, UP, BNSF, and NS, is tremendously overdesigned as to functionality, technology, and infrastructure. The net of this is a 5-fold increase in investment (my estimate). However, it still is not too late to scream “ I’m not going to take anymore!” and design your PTC implementation in a fashion to avoid most of the unnecessary stuff.  Here’s the story in 3 simple bullets.

• As was addressed in an earlier posting on this blog, YOY WIUs, it is clear that the recent estimate of 50,000 wayside interface units (WIUs) that provide wireless data paths from wayside infrastructure components to the PTC client on the locomotive and the PTC server in the office is off by a factor of 60%, minimum. As explained in the earlier posting, WIU’s are not required for Intermediary Signals (ISs) and control points. The former is not a required function of the PTC mandate (in fact, doing so may actually increase risk), and the latter can be done via the already installed code line.

• I find no evidence of anyone doing an actual data throughput analysis for PTC. From my personal experience, having been the architect for the first overlay PTC system that provided the foundation for the Class I pursuits, there is very little data throughput required (save track data base downloads that can be handled via WiFi in the yard).  And yet, the ultimate wireless data system is being developed by ITC.  It is clear that PTC has nothing to do with this development in actuality. The railroad technicians want the network (they love the challenge), and perhaps someday they will need it (there currently is little to no strategy as to how the network could be used), and they are using PTC as the excuse.

• Complimentary to the above point, the railroads actually don’t even need the 220 MHz network.  What they failed to do several years ago was to use digital trunked radio technology to outfit the current analog 160 MHz infrastructure to meet the FCC’s narrowbanding requirement.  They are already switching that network from analog to digital, but they have chosen to use conventional radio instead of trunked. Granted it would have been a complicated transition, but $1 billion cheaper by avoiding the 220 MHz infrastructure. Again, the railroads’ technicians took it upon themselves to address challenges without proper executive management understanding and oversight which would have required proper business case analyses.

The bottom line on the railroads’ bottom lines is that the cost of PTC implementation could be reduced from the estimate $10 Billion to a mere $2 billion, give or take a $1 billion. But to take advantage of this Spring reduction, someone has to stand up now and say scrap the 220 MHz, install digital trunk 160 MHz, and ignore 60% of those WIU’s.  Of course that won’t happen. What a shame.

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