Inward Facing "Cab Cameras" to be installed

[Caesar La Rock]

I don't want to sound pessimistic about inward facing cameras, but a camera trained on the engineer isn't going to stop accidents from happening anyway. They're still going to happen, the camera isn't going to put the train in emergency if it overspeeds.

If they're really serious about preventing accidents like what happened with 188, PTC is all I can say. The NEC can easily do it, but sadly outside of the NEC, the Big 4 (the freight railroads) are hesitant or outright against implementing it.

 

[jis]

In an ideal world inward facing camera will not prevent any untoward incident. It will help in getting a better and more informed report after the fact on what happened in an incident.

In a less than ideal world where we live, where there is a possibility that there are some systemic rule avoidance or misuse in the periphery of rules going on, they will stop or at least become less likely, thus indirectly reducing the chances of mishaps, if one believes that the rules are really written in someone's blood as is claimed by many railwaymen, and actually serve a purpose.

PTC and cameras do not address the same problem. PTC absolutely helps prevent accidents by essentially taking the engineer out of the loop when s/he knowingly or unknowingly tries to take the train out of its safety envelope. The civil speed enforcement aspect of PTC helps much much more in a high speed railroad with frequent changes in MAS as is the case on the NEC, way more than it does in the gentle bullock cart like accelerations to 60mph and carry on for miles and miles situation. it does help but not as critically. It is the absolute stop at home signals aspect that becomes way more critical there, since the cause of many accidents there seems to be people just falling asleep or going into a trance and just missing signals.

 

[leemell]

In Metrolinks case, the probably sub rosa (maybe not so sub rosa) reason was to stop personal cell phone use by the engineer. The NTSB fault of the Chatsworth accident was the texting by the engineer and there by probably causing him to miss the stop signal.

 

[Lonestar648]

I know the trucking industry was experimenting with an inward facing camera that focused on the driver's eyes. The system would sound a loud beep if the driver closed their eyes, looked away longer than a glance. Purpose was to eliminate falling asleep, texting, and daydreaming. The number of occurrences where a beep had sounded would be transmitted back to the Safety Department once a day. They found a driver did more than a glance in passing a difficult vehicle. Don't know if something like this could be a compromise.

 

[Headache]

They already have the equivalent of one of the "black boxes" (flight data/event recorder).

The other one (cockpit voice recorder) wouldn't be terribly useful with just one person in the cab. You'd get ambient noises, which would be something, I guess.

The CVR was very useful in helping to determine what the pilot was doing leading up to the crash Germanwings Flight 9525 as well as a prior flight with the same co-pilot. I think it would be a good compromise in this situation for rail usage while still allowing privacy.