Train speed weirdness

[John Bredin]

Looking at this tracker just a couple of minutes ago, I saw some Midwest trains going faster than I thought was allowed.
*Wolverine 353 was going just under 120mph in Dearborn.
*Missouri River Runner 314 was going about 113mph.
Both of these are above 110mph, and I didn't think the River Runner route had been improved for 110mph running in the first place.

Of course, now that I decided to post about it, both trains have dropped below 70mph on the map.

 

[JoeBas]

Amtrak: Crap, he's on to us!!! SLOW DOWN EVERYONE!!!

In all seriousness, it was mentioned in another threat that it appeared the speeds were being shown in KPH instead of MPH this morning for some reason. Knowing IT, probably patch related.

 

[AmtrakBlue]

divide the speed value by 1.609

 

[neroden]

Amtrak's IT department is a disaster area. Accidentally set the readouts to km/h without changing the public display of "mph".

 

[AmtrakBlue]

And it’s fixed. At least two people took the time to notify Amtrak of the issue.

 

[user 1215]

I've seen this happen before...

 

[jis]

Doesn't anyone at Amtrak IT ever look at their own customer facing web pages, or use them? I suspect if they did they'd be quicker at fixing these obvious glitches.

When I was managing a whole departments worth of development environment including diskless workstations on each desktop in Bell Labs in the '80s, the first thing I did was to test a change in a sand box to make sure it does what it is supposed to. Then I brought it on line, and immediately tested again in the fully deployed setup to make sure nothing screwed up. This is (or should be) standard practice for deploying changes to a customer facing app/web page. Apparently Amtrak IT is yet to come up to what we did 40 years back!

 

[George Harris]

Don't forget when seeing these sorts of errors, there is always the component in management that says, "What do you mean it will take three days to get it right? if I wanted it in three days, I wouldn't have asked for it before then." This sometimes leads to act in haste repent at leisure issues. I recently read a report, I refrain to say from where to protect the guilty, other than to say from an outside the US source, that had a table with column headings saying the forces were given in kiloNewtons. It was fairly obvious from discussion in the reports the numbers were in kilograms. Oops, by a factor of 9.8. There are a couple in things that I have written that have gone out to the public in pdf's that had obvious edit misses, such as in one case using "their" when it should have been "there" and a semicolon where it should have been a full colon. I still cringe. Spell check will not catch everything.

 

[neroden]

Doesn't anyone at Amtrak IT ever look at their own customer facing web pages, or use them?

These are the "geniuses" who didn't think timetables were important. Clearly they don't use their own pages or ride trains.

 

[MIrailfan]

Amtrak: Crap, he's on to us!!! SLOW DOWN EVERYONE!!!

In all seriousness, it was mentioned in another threat that it appeared the speeds were being shown in KPH instead of MPH this morning for some reason. Knowing IT, probably patch related.

no wonder last night i saw the #7 EB going 110 mph.

 

[JoeBas]

Doesn't anyone at Amtrak IT ever look at their own customer facing web pages, or use them? I suspect if they did they'd be quicker at fixing these obvious glitches.

When I was managing a whole departments worth of development environment including diskless workstations on each desktop in Bell Labs in the '80s, the first thing I did was to test a change in a sand box to make sure it does what it is supposed to. Then I brought it on line, and immediately tested again in the fully deployed setup to make sure nothing screwed up. This is (or should be) standard practice for deploying changes to a customer facing app/web page. Apparently Amtrak IT is yet to come up to what we did 40 years back!

Give the guy a break, he probably just missed a decimal somewhere...

 

[zephyr17]

These are the "geniuses" who didn't think timetables were important. Clearly they don't use their own pages or ride trains.

Forget it, Jake. It's Amtrak IT.

 

[mcropod]

divide the speed value by 1.609

Or, to turn it into something mental arithmetic-ish, divide by eight, then multiply the result by five.

Because I don't speak or live in mph any more, I haven't had to think about translating it for decades. There's so few places left on the planet which still use such quaint imperial measurements. And we generally measure distance in hours anyway - how long does it take to get there? - using 100kms as the hourly average travel distance standard outside the cities.

 

[AmtrakBlue]

Or, to turn it into something mental arithmetic-ish, divide by eight, then multiply the result by five.

Because I don't speak or live in mph any more, I haven't had to think about translating it for decades. There's so few places left on the planet which still use such quaint imperial measurements. And we generally measure distance in hours anyway - how long does it take to get there? - using 100kms as the hourly average travel distance standard outside the cities.

I just copied/pasted that from a google search. I have no clue how to convert to/from metric, despite how were were told back in the 70's that we, the USA, would be converting some day. The way I looked at it back then and today. A 64 oz soda is still going to be the largest soda bottle no matter what the metric says on the label.

 

[neroden]

We were going to convert to metric under President Carter. It was stopped by the intervention of Ronald Reagan, to my eternal disgust.

 

[MARC Rider]

I just copied/pasted that from a google search. I have no cue how to convert to/from metric, despite how were were told back in the 70's that we, the USA, would be converting some day. They way I looked at it back then and today. A 64 oz soda is still going to be the largest soda bottle no matter what the metric says on the label.

Actually, that 64 oz soda is now a 2 liter soda, one of the few products commonly sold in metric sizes in the USA. Booze is one of the other common metric products. (A standard size wine or liquor bottle is 750 ml.)

 

[City of Miami]

There's so few places left on the planet which still use such quaint imperial measurements.

I understand the Brits are turning back to Imperial. Something to do with Brexit.

 

[MARC Rider]

Actually, that 64 oz soda is now a 2 liter soda, one of the few products commonly sold in metric sizes in the USA. Booze is one of the other common metric products. (A standard size wine or liquor bottle is 750 ml.)

Another interesting piece of trivia is that the USA actually is a metric country. All of the US Customary units are legally defined on the basis of the equivalent metric unit.

 

[Rambling Robert]

In the mid 1960’s the high school pre-engineering course I was fortunate to take made us use both ASTME and Metric. The U.S. automobile industry was the major block to converting. One word - tooling.

Coming out of Boston Backbay I was surprised by the acceleration and used an app to click the speed ... to 103MPH steady to the Route 128 station. This was on the regular NEC not Acela.

 

[mcropod]

I understand the Brits are turning back to Imperial. Something to do with Brexit.

There's a section of the English electorate which hankers for the world as it was in the 1800s (only with less rickets and cholera), when a loud voice and a braying English public school accent was enough to have all corners of the Empire jump to do its bidding. It's this bunch, rather than 'Brits' (many of whom are keen to see the back of these Hooray Henrys and soundly rejected Brexit), which wants to see Imperial measurements legal again. The Brexit connection is because they think they still trade with a grateful Empire, and the old Empire will be pleased to change everything for their benefit.

For the life of me I can't think why the USA seeks to align itself with them - they are fossils even in England. If an unsophisticated country like Australia can ditch Imperial for metric almost instantly about fifty years ago, surely the USA can.

 

[BlackDiamond]

Umm as someone born in and who lived in the UK for several years I would disagree with mcropod's analysis. Brexit has more to do with dissatisfaction with rule by an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels and various arbitrary rulings such as fishing rights that go against the interests of Britain. No doubt there are those nostalgic for the 19th century past but I suspect that is a small minority. In actual fact most of British life has gone metric with the notable exception of speed limits on the highways.

Personally I remember the push to go metric in the 1970s and how working in a research lab we had to now write all our papers using the metric system. That effort stalled - for a while we had road signs with both miles and km, now those have disappeared except for a few places such as near the Canadian border. Seems a lot of things like packaging have already converted e.g. the soda bottle example, but road speed limits seem to be the biggest holdout.

 

[MARC Rider]

Personally I remember the push to go metric in the 1970s and how working in a research lab we had to now write all our papers using the metric system.

When I worked for the USGS 1979-2000, the general rule was to write the paper in the units you used to measure things. Because of a lot of sunk costs, a lot of stuff was done in US customary units, but there were some exceptions, like chemicals analyses, which were always expressed as mg/L or ug/L. Sometimes if we published in a journal, everything had to be not only metric, but SI. Generally we wrote reports for state agencies and the general public using US Customary units with a conversion table for the SI units in the front of the report.

When I went to EPA in 2000, things were similar, and still are. Air pollution emission standards use the mixed term "gm/mile." When I was doing my original work with tires and trailer fairings, we published in SAE, and they allowed US customary units if you were more or less consistent (couldn't do much about the gm/mile thing). I published a paper in Tire Science and Technology, and they wanted everything in metric units. As we had made a lot of our measurements in US customary, that was a pain in the neck. I hope I caught all the arithmetic errors from the conversion.

 

[dwebarts]

The US should have changed to metric when Canada did. Sure, it would have been hard for a while, but so what? The obsession with short-term thinking instead of long-term has hurt businesses more often than not, let alone individuals.

The decade or so when most people would need to be highly conversant in both systems might have improved the overall reasoning ability of the population. This would've been a good thing.

 

[MARC Rider]

The US should have changed to metric when Canada did.

What? Admit that we Americans don't have the power and large internal market to tell the rest of the world that we'll do things our own way?

That's really what it was all about. This was especially true circa 1980 just after the Vietnam debacle of 1975 when many Americans finally saw the limits of American power. Of course, the whole thing is symbolic. American industry knew they had to go metric if they wanted foreign markets, and that's what we more or less did. It's just all under the hood, so the average American doesn't have to face the fact that we're no longer kings of the world.

 

[jis]

There are three and a half countries that are not Metric today. They are [drum-roll] Myanmar, Liberia and the USA, and the half is UK.

Due to globalization of industry, the original excuse for not going Metric has mostly disappeared, and those that were being saved by not doing so more or less all use Metric tooling now. There is really not much that the US and even UK can do that will change anything in the rest of the world as far as this goes. Yeah, like in Iraq they might drag along a few more "coalition of the willing" with heavy hitters like Palau and Kiribati and such.

For the US, and UK it is typical behavior of the top dog honchos when they are not quite at the top anymore. A combination of denial and rear guard action while retreating.