>>I thought rail cars had bar codes painted on the sides these days, along
>>with track-side monitoring units that would report to some-one who in turn
>>could notify the engineer on the train??
>
>
>There are track side units that look for dragging equipment and hot
>bearings.
>They don't ID the car (they just say how many axles back in the train it
>is).
>
>Cars once had colored stripes called "ACI labels" , but the system was never
>reliable and was discontinued - basicly a case of being ahead of the curve.
>Recently a similar system's been reintroduced, with a transponder instead of
>the label.
>
>You mentioned other things the PIC could do. The most important would be
>actuating the air brakes. Electropneumatic air brakes have been a dream of
>RR people for years. If you have a mile long freight and you open the train
>pipe
>that runs the length of the train, it'll take some time (during which the
>train is bearing
>down on a school bus) to empty the air from the rear car.
>Unfortunately, the difficulty of making a reliable electrical connection
>that won't
>be a maintainence nightmare for the approximately one million RR cars out
>there
>has proved beyond solution.
>
>