WTH!!! A west coaster gets to ride behind a ACS before meeeeee??!!
I find it amusing that pride of place in the very center of the controls is... a clipboard for paper. Sometimes the old ways are best.
Good. There has not been an update posted here in a while on the deployment into service of the ACS-64s, although there have been reports on rr.net. I think maybe 6 units are now in revenue service on the southern end of the NEC? A comprehensive update would be useful if someone has been keeping track.
General chit-chat on various railroad boards has indicated that the engineers and maintenance people Do Not Like the HHP-8s. It's also a very small class of locomotive (only 15), which creates spare parts headaches. Also, the ACS-64 numbering range is set to overlap the HHP-8 numbering range. So the HHP-8s probably will be retired first.
Even with the redundancies in place with PTC/ACSES that will only grow in the next few years, I think it will be awhile yet before paper orders go by the wayside (no pun intended). Computer systems can fail, but when it comes to complying with speed restrictions there's no better fail safe than a piece of paper and a trained crew.
It's well known that almost everybody can't stand them.
Plus I assume special orders can cover more than what can be enforced with PTC/ACSES such as orders dealing with horns, braking method, sand use, general info on what's happening on different tracks etc. I'll admit I'm guessing here, so I hope someone that knows more can chime in, but I'm assuming that such things could be covered. Plus, even in PTC areas, won't form Ds or whatever each railroad uses have to be issued for operating against the signals, or will PTC/ACSES render all tracks effectively bi-directionally signaled?
