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With the entire loopy new 12 months’s information (electrical truck terrorism is a factor now apparently), a information story from simply a few weeks in the past appears like historic information. It’s nearly like that Pecos, Texas prepare derailment occurred final 12 months or one thing! (oh, wait…)
Some on-line commenters had been saying that autonomous vehicles would repair this downside. Which may be true (sometime), however we’ve got to take into account that autonomous automobiles are solely pretty much as good as their knowledge. Planning a very good route that retains truck hundreds from getting hung up on railroad tracks is important, however the identical maps people depend on might be unsuitable and when building modifications the highway scenario across the observe, maps recommending good crossings can grow to be outdated.
Electrical vehicles may be slightly higher at pulling heavy hundreds out of a bind with all of that torque, however there are methods that automobiles can get hung up that no quantity of torque can repair.
This unofficial PSA announcement from YouTube shares a good simpler solution to stop lack of life when issues like this occur, no matter whether or not a human drove an ICE or a robotic drove an EV into this predicament:
An vital factor to bear in mind is that the truck was hung up on the tracks for round 45 minutes! You’d suppose that somebody, whether or not or not it’s the truck driver or the police dispatcher, would have let the railroad know that there was a dangerously massive merchandise caught on the tracks. However, no one obtained round to giving the railroad enough warning to get the prepare stopped in time.
Sadly, this could have been an easy factor to do. Each railroad crossing has small indicators with a cellphone quantity on it that anyone can name. You don’t should be a truck driver, a police officer, or the grand poobah of the Loyal Order of the Water Buffaloes to name that quantity. When you suppose there’s a security downside, you (sure, YOU!) can name the quantity and provides the railroad firm a heads up. They’d moderately you err on the facet of warning and report one thing that doesn’t become an issue than have one thing huge get ignored.
There’s additionally a set of numbers and letters on the signal you can provide the railroad dispatcher to determine the crossing. You don’t should know the place you might be, what city you’re in, or what the closest cross road is. You possibly can be so confused that you simply suppose you’re on the nook of Stroll and Don’t Stroll streets, and the dispatcher can nonetheless use the numbers to get the best trains stopped in time.
Trains are one of many cleanest and most vitality environment friendly methods to maneuver items. The rails current quite a bit much less rolling resistance, permitting a comparatively small quantity of gasoline to maneuver insane quantities of cargo. On common, a prepare can transfer a ton of cargo 500 miles burning solely a gallon of diesel! That makes trains much more environment friendly than EVs. To maintain them going, all of us must do our half for security, and it solely takes one cellphone name from the best individual on the proper time.
Featured picture: a screenshot from the embedded video (truthful use).
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