On Fri, Apr 26, 2002 at 08:42:21PM -0400, David Lesher wrote:
C) How deep do you want it? ATT put their #5 TCC cable down 4'; no easy task. {But then, we paid for it...}. Will that help when a locomotive lands on it? If it doesn't... it's much harder to fix.
The average locomotive is something above 100 tons. On anything but your usual passenger service, it's common to see at least 2, and up to 4, units on the front (often not all of them are in service or at full capacity). It's also relatively boxy, nearly flat. Flip it over, cause the front bit to go do into the dirt, and it will make a *lovely* plow. Anyone doubting this should look at aerial footage from news crews after such an accident; things often look like a road-scraper went by. 4' might be deep enough - and it might not, though I'd suspect that it will be protected from most derailments. But, as noted above... 4' costs a lot to accomplish. If the cost of a derailment-induced outage is low (latency, rerouting, a few minutes of problems while the system reacts), it probably costs a hell of a lot less than burying that many miles of cable 4' deep. Even when you run the averages. And 1' deep probably just isn't going to cut it, as it were. -- *************************************************************************** Joel Baker System Administrator - lightbearer.com lucifer@lightbearer.com http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/