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moonbunnychan t1_its999v wrote

Reply to comment by MCStarlight in Does anyone know how to become a Metro train driver? by lord_guppy

Considering it was an automatic train control thing that caused that crash in 2009, I don't exactly trust them to maintain automatic controls to stay safe enough.

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Wonderful-Speaker-32 t1_itss7ik wrote

The crash wasn't because of ATO:

"WMATA disabled ATO on June 23, 2009 in a knee-jerk reaction after a Red Line train crashed into the back of another, killing eight riders and a train operator. ATO wasn’t at fault, but the underlying system that controls train locations and keeps them separated was." from https://ggwash.org/view/69545/metro-reasons-good-news-for-riders-computer-driven-trains-are-coming-back#:~:text=Metro%20had%20computer%2Ddriven%20trains,and%20keeps%20them%20separated%20was.

That crash likely would've happened regardless, since the drivers didn't have line of sight until it was too late, and the train operator behind wouldn't have been able to see that there was a train ahead of it any other way (because the problem had to do with the train location system).

These days, they'd likely have to put in GPS based tracking together with track-based tracking to ensure everything's going smoothly.

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