Results tagged “manualmode”

WMATA: Trains Will Operate in Manual Mode For a Long Time

The National Transportation Safety Board today issued what it's calling an "urgent safety recommendation" to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, based on the preliminary findings of its investigation into the fatal June 22 Red Line crash. Despite the fact that the investigation has not yet concluded and the NTSB has yet to say officially what they believe was the cause of the accident, they have gone ahead and told WMATA that the transit agency needs to adopt "enhanced safety redundancy" of its train control system. Here's what they said:

A recent accident on the Metrorail's Red Line between the Fort Totten and Takoma stations has shown that WMATA's train control system is susceptible to a single point failure because it did not fail safe and stop a train when detection of a preceding train was lost. The urgent safety recommendation issued today calls for WMATA to evaluate track occupancy data on a real-time basis in order to detect losses in track occupancy and automatically generate alerts to prompt such actions as immediately stopping train movements or implementing appropriate speed restrictions to prevent collisions.

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