On Wed, 13 Oct 1999 16:19:29 -0700 Mark Willis writes: > Distribute the rockets, one smaller pair per car, would make better > sense to me. OK, this is properly marked [OT], etc. so I'll turn the discussion political as this is the real reason the railroads don't have a better way to stop a train. No matter how good the brakes are, there are going to be situations where the train can't stop in time. Whenever the train doesn't stop in time, the railroad will very likely be sued. Suppose the train has a system of rockets on every other car, installed at a cost of $X, and the rockets worked properly, but the train still didn't stop in time. Lawyers for the person who happened to be in the way of the train will not be impressed. In fact the rocket system proves a weakness for the railroad. The plaintiff's lawyers will ask "Why didn't they put rockets on *every* car, then the train could have stopped in time." They continue by pointing out the obvious reason is that rockets on every car would cost approximately $2X, and the railroad's "price of a child's life" isn't that high. Though you might consider this logic rediculous rubbish, it has great pull with juries. So the best thing to do is not investigate new stopping technology, lest this dangerous spiral of having anything less than the most expensive possible being unsatisfactory. Another equally probable scenario involves the retro-rocket train not stopping in time because one or more of the rockets didn't fire for some reason, though it did eventually stop with the air brakes. You might think that that is still OK because at least they had equipped the train with two methods for stopping, making it much less dangerous than before when there was only one method. But it is easy to convince a jury that the railroad had loosed a dangerous, defective, poorly maintained train on the public. Because of this nonsense, the only way new safety devices are ever fielded on trains, cars, etc. is by the demand of the government. Then the railroad can say "this train had all the safety features required by the government." If you're thinking that the dirty business that trial lawyers do is good in some way because it forces manufacturers to make safer products instead of the government having to pile on more and more regulations, actually it's just the opposite. ___________________________________________________________________ Get the Internet just the way you want it. Free software, free e-mail, and free Internet access for a month! Try Juno Web: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj.