Talk:Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System

Butchered
Damn, somebody butchered this page. Lots of detailed information about ACSES has been removed. Good grief. Damotclese (talk) 03:29, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

References have disappeared
Reference 1 and 3 are no longer accessible (jis (talk) 14:58, 20 May 2012 (UTC))

PHW did *not* design this
The article says that PHW and Alstom designed this system. That is not true. Alstom and Safetran Systems out of Rancho Cucamonga, California designed this system. Damotclese (talk) 06:33, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

Needs some corrections
It's not Safetran radios that are used in the base stations or onboard, the radios are either a Motorola 440MHZ which has fairly low wattage, or it is a massive MCM that conveys 50+ watts. I see a number of inaccuracies, but overall I see that much of my article here has been removed for some reason. Drat. I'm going to have to step through carefully and correct things. Damotclese (talk) 06:43, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

ACSES v1 vs ACSES v2
Most of the technical information applies to ACSES version 2 which replaced the use of fixed transponders for the transmission of Temporary Speed Restriction information with data radios. Seeing as NJT's flavor of ACSES will be using an all transponder system this information should be included.Sturmovik (talk) 22:06, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Still butchered and obsolete
Someone came in and gutted the article, and I see that it's still obsolete. The ACSES deployed in the Northeast Corridor has been and continues to be expanded with ACSES-capable hardware and software not described in the extant article. Looks like I need to get out of the forest and fix this. Damotclese (talk) 03:40, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

Planned Updates
The article is out of date and missing information, however ACSES is being deployed more fully in the Northeast Corridor and along Long Island Rail Road (Some Details Here) so once the details are known I will correct the extant article. Damotclese (talk) 23:57, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20090920105050/http://www.arema.org:80/eseries/scriptcontent/custom/e_arema/comm/c37/05-01-08/AREMA_MP_23-2-1_New_2008_Mar_F.doc to http://www.arema.org/eseries/scriptcontent/custom/e_arema/comm/c37/05-01-08/AREMA_MP_23-2-1_New_2008_Mar_F.doc

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 15:57, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

FRA August 2012 Report To Congress
In August 2012 the FRA -- Federal Railroad Administration -- submitted their report on Positive Train Control roll-out to Congress, noting that our nation's railroads would not meet the December 2015 deadline to implement PTC but that some lines had met their goals. The FRA stated:

"In the United States, the most successful and widely deployed of the PTC systems in existence is the Amtrak Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System (ACSES.) After starting in 1993, Amtrak has been able to deploy ACSES on their entire Northeast Corridor property in revenue service."

The FRA report continues to explain that ACSES lets them successfully roll at speeds up to 150 MPH but that ACSES remains expensive due to its inability to inter-operate with other PTC technologies -- which is entirely true, ACSES was rolled-out before the effort to create a wider standard.

The ground network was Safetran components described in the extant article were not expensive, a grand total of 3 software engineers completed that effort across 3 months working with Alstom / Amtrak, yet it does not inter-operate with the ITC's Class "C" and "D" protocols running inside of Meteorcomm’s infrastructure protocol stack. Maybe ACSES Mark II will.

While checking to see if Wikipedia articles need to reference the August 2012 Report, I noticed that there is no "See also" entry for the Congressional requirement Rail Safety Improvement Act 2008 offered. Does any editor here have a suitable link which points to the Act which can be added to "See Also?" Thanks! Damotclese (talk) 22:15, 16 October 2015 (UTC)


 * I found Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008. Looks like capitalizing the "of" makes it a broken link. Maybe this should be added to "See Also." Damotclese (talk) 22:16, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20080517094712/http://www.phwinc.com/ to http://www.phwinc.com/

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 01:50, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Looks fine to me, however the Wayback is missing the usual objects. Damotclese (talk) 17:05, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Product development not complete
...is a positive train control Cab signalling system developed by PHW and Alstom... -- Well not entirely. Safetran Systems Inc. (now owned by Siemens) developed the ground-based radio and track-embedded encoder communications systems. Damotclese (talk) 17:20, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

BCM -- Base Control Module
I see that a "citation needed" was added to the article for the letters "BCM." BCM stands for Base Control Module, it is in the ACSES system designed and developed by Safetran a 68302 CPU based control board which shuffles data between two radios, typically a large, heavy-wattage Motorola radio and a small Safetran radio, with the large radio connecting long distance links in to a line of radios, and the smaller ones talking to the on-board locomotive radio and computer systems beyond that on board.

The BCM in some ACSES systems also communicates with encoders buried under the track which the locomotive energies conductively when the locomotive rolls over them. The encoders send information to the on-board systems by sending digital data to the BCM via wires, the BCM sends the information to the MCM (mobile communications module) which sends it to a radio which send it to the locomotive on board systems. The digital information usually contains mile marker, identifier, grade information, and other information so that the locomotive knows exactly where it is in an automated way. SoftwareThing (talk) 16:57, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
 * I added the "definition needed" because the abbreviation "BCM" was being used, but had not been defined nor described previously in the article. I found it confusing to be blunt.  In fact the article appears to be written by an editor that knows the system. The article is not written to inform the "readership" of this encyclopedia.  As a new editor, I am seeing that in a lot of articles. - Van Nest 46 (talk) 10:16, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Loss of ACSES
The first iteration of ACSES fielded by Safetran (now defunct after being purchased by Siemens) decades ago was disabled by Belarusian rail workers in the immediate invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin: [|The Belarusian railway workers who helped thwart Russia’s attack on Kyiv]. Safetran's fielding in to Belarus lacked the TSR Temporary Speed Restriction functionality that was fielded by Alstom-Amtrak along the NEC, but the ground network ACSES and the Home-Distant relay wayside signaling using Wayside Access Gateways that was fielded has apparently been destroyed or damaged by Belarusian rail employees.

The non-vital software that went in to ACSES I uses an IP network and network clustering among the WIUs, so disabling just one or two in line or even just removing their radio masts for the Afar radios would have been enough to bring the rail to a crawl. SoftwareThing (talk) 16:35, 24 April 2022 (UTC)


 * That WaPo article mentioned nothing about ACSES. Belarusian saboteurs were going after the ABS and interlocking "relay" huts.Sturmovik (talk) 18:28, 25 April 2022 (UTC)