British Rail Moving Forward with Sat-Nav/GPS

de1orean writes "The BBC is reporting that after a successful limited trial using GPS satellite navigation to improve train safety and efficiency, British Rail is committed to instituting sat-nav throughout the system. It may be in operation as early as 2008."

Re:So.... why do trains need GPS?

[TechyImmigrant]

No. However the infrastructure across the UK is ancient and so neglected since Thatcher put the knife in that it pretty much needs completely replacing.

Rather than installing a *lot* of cabling, a wireless system would obviously be cheaper.

They are doing it because its cheaper.

Re:Don't knw if anyone realizes this...

[BasilBrush]

Yes, the Central Line underground line and the Docklands light railway in London are also computer driven. The Central Line has a driver sat in the cab doing nothing, but the DLR manages without. Mind you neither of them use sat nav to do it, what with them being undergrround much of the time.

"1 metre accuracy" always amuses me....

[stimpleton]

...as the onboard unit would have to send data at the rate of hundreds of location datagrams per minute. The point being, a location is a point in time - may not be relevant 30 seconds later, travelling at 150km/hr. Trains move quite quickly, and given past British rail mishaps, existing systems must have to be sped up a bit.

With that said, GPS/GPRS units would have to communicate fairly frequently. At the very most a location sent to the server(probably over GPRS as a UDP datagram) every 2 minutes.

In New Zealand, the GSM provider here (business plan) charges per 10,000KB packet, even for a 500byte datagram :-(

Some rough maths:
A location data packet(charged at 10k) every 1 minute.

Thats 0.6 MB per hour.
Train runs, say, 10 hours per day, thats 6mb.
Per month thats 180mb.
In New Zealand, thats about $200 of data.
In my town, a taxi company uses it. The combined cost per month is $33,000 in data charges.
And thats on 5 min updates!
Anyone got some info on charges from other countries?
IE how much will is cost our pommie friends per month per train, running 10 hr/days, sending location every 5,2,1 minutes, 30 seconds?

Re:Low tech incompetence

[Linker3000]

True: the high tech stuff isn't always better neither:

I live on the South Coast of England and we are in the process of phasing out our old trains (from the 1950s and 1960s!!) and replacing them with new ones. The new units are very high tech, with air con (at last!), electric doors, LED indicator boards and high-tech toilets etc. The first problem encountered was that even with new, efficiant motors and electronic switchgear the new trains took more power to run than the old ones and so much of the power infrastructure has had to be upgraded too. While this was being done, the commuter trains into London had to have fewer carriages than normal to keep them within the power rating of the track and so already crowded trains became even worse.

Next, the GPS systems that control the doors (which side to open and when), kept breaking down and so commuters would find themselves stuck either inside or outside the trains!

It was also discovered that the trains were a slightly different width from the old ones and so some platforms had to be 'shaved' to prevent the trains from scraping against them. The toilets keep breaking down, can't be filled with water or emptied and so it's fairly common to be on a train out of London (1.5 hours to home) with no working toilets and to cap it all, on some units the carriage coupling systems (high-tech, of course), don't work properly so, for example, at my home station where two trains meet and couple to form a 12 carriage commuter unit for London, it's fairly common for only the front 8 to be available - leading to more overcrowding. The new units are so packed with electronics that they generate a heck of a lot of RF interference and it's impossible to get a good radio signal; my only 'pleasure' of the London journey was dozing to the news and this is not possible any more. Finally, considering that my home area is a major commuter run into the City of London, it's crazy that, unlike some other regional services, the train company hasn't provided power outlets for laptops - mind you, considering their power problems, perhaps this isn't a surprise.

Re:Lost trains not as uncommon as you might think

[miu]

Excellent post, but it ignores is availability of GPS or Galileo. I'm sure that question is being considered by BR and has been solved by other systems that use a satellite system - but I do have to wonder how much of the lower running/maintenance costs are needed to solve it.

Rebooting Trains

[Anonymous Coward]

Being a victim of british public transport, the trains are all good except from when their computers error, several times this past year I have been delayed as the trains pc requires a reboot. Atmospheric as it goes all quite and the lights go out, but never the less annoying.

Other problems include the trains not realising its at a train station so the doors do not open until a guard manually opens them. Nowadays the guards seem to open the doors manually all the time!

It has only been a handful of delays but still more than all the problems I experienced on the old stock of trains from a decade of rail travel.

Re:First impression

[Bazman]

The fact that trains can't wander all over the place is part of the problem! If a faulty-set switch causes two trains to be heading for each other on the same piece of track, you can't tell them both to turn left, like you could do with airplanes.

GPS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it safe to depend on GPS considering the US Administration said it was willing to turn it off during "terrorist acts"?

I think having the EU's Gallileo (when it's up) as a backup, and even some kind of intertial system as well would be a good idea for safety reasons.

is the gps tracker in the engine or caboose?

[way2trivial]

should be both
'cause if a car falls off the end, who knows?

Cheap Inertial Navigation

[Detritus]

An inertial navigation system would be an obvious fix to the limited availability of GPS. When GPS fixes are available, they can be used to zero the drift on the inertial platform. What's the going price for a complete inertial navigation system these days? Today we have laser ring gyros and micro-machined accelerometers, which should cut the cost. If they can install them on commercial aircraft, they should be able to put one on a train.