Cottage Renovations

[OT from cottage renovations]
[selected images crossposted to texture]

 
here's where it all happened: 

CSX 'A' Line (North End and South End subdivisions)
Petersburg VA to Selma NC (milepost 22 to 161)

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the second day started early, hours before sunup.  we cleared out of our Stony Creek lodgings to catch CSX freights barreling through the cool and crisp night.  with voice radio and ATCS packets as our guides we followed the main line's traffic, catching a breathtaking view of Amtrak's Auto Train gliding North across a cold steel viaduct, its silver sides gleaming in starlight.  Jarratt, Emporia, Halifax, Enfield and Whittakers: cloaked in shadow their hardscrabble small town details were lost in the nightscape magic of railroading in the dark. 

as light brought forth the day the setting came into plainer view, providing the context for dropping through abstraction down to the physical layers around us but also softening edges: morning light will do that. 

(click through these thumbnails for higher resolution images)

not of iron

one who waits along the main line for an oncoming train can provide a few moments worth of morning entertainment to these locals, their grazing set aside long enough to assuage their curiosity.  the one on the L might seem to be wearing a jeweled halter but it ain't so: the bright circles of light are pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) berries in the foreground, dipped in autumnal morning dew in the light.  ugh. 

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cash crop

what does a damnyankee know about cotton? 
not much: plantations, boll weevils, Eli Whitney, aspirin bottles. 

gossypium hirsutum

this field, through which a dirt track might have led to the Delmar control point, was obviously ready for harvesting. 

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sweet spot

years ago the railroad was downsized from double track to single, with passing sidings to permit bidirectional operation.  this location near milepost 71.2 in Dahlia VA is on the outside of a curve, an excellent spot to stop for a little while and give the trains a chance to come to us. 

when the railroad switched its signal system from trackside wires to radio communications two things happened:

• movement information became accessible through the ATCS Monitor
• the poles were cut down, opening up the view along the tracks

another consequence was this material for texture studies. 

pole line down

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where the trains meet

having emerged from single track segments onto a few miles of passing track at the right time, these passenger trains met at speed. 

meet

a still photograph really doesn't do justice to the spectacle of this pair of trains, their approach heralded by the sounds of whistles at grade crossings, charging off the straightaways and slipping around the curve with a whoosh and a clatter, hurrying along the line to the next stops on their respective runs. 

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a few short hours later it was my turn to ride rather than to chase: the next Northbound passenger train brought me back to Union Station whence I headed back to the Grove, leaving the main line across the Piedmont to host again its nightly fleet of fast trains under the darkest of skies and the clearest of stars. 

[OT from cottage renovations]

the ATCS Monitor allows one to pick up control system data packets by radio and interpret their contents.  it's a nifty tool but to get it to work there are more than a few steps of preparation to complete, the first of which are to find out what frequencies and protocols are in use and where the transmitters are located. 

much of this can be done through research and by consulting reference sources, but there's no substitute for going out into the field to see what's going on.  so on Sunday we set off to head up the (former) Southern Pacific from Roseville to a place called Binney Junction where it crosses the (former) Western Pacific main line in Marysville, stopping at control points along the way. 

(click through these thumbnails for higher resolution images)

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N Ostrom control point, MP 134.36

how does one find the transmitters? 
it turns out to be completely trivial.  just look. 

(  +1  )

X marks the spot

I have no idea why this huge X doesn't show up on the Google and Microsoft online maps.  it would make things so much easier ...

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S Ostrom control point, MP 132.65

finding the control point is a good first start, but to make any sense of the data there has to be some data, and the SCS-128 protocols used out there don't have anything to say unless a train shows up.  as it happens, one did, and it went into the siding and stopped to change crews. 

crew change

it was a real monster, about 130 cars long with four high horsepower locomotives on the head end and three more as a swing helper, cut in about two thirds of the way back.  the siding is a bit less than 1¾ miles long and the train just barely fit.  while stopped it was overtaken by another, equally large train. 

next: incidental images

[OT from cottage renovations]

so what the heck has been going on the past few days?

previously in this space I've written about this notion I've had of the potential use of railroad signal data as telemetry.  it probably comes from my years at Intelsat back when it was the international treaty organisation that owned and operated the global communications satellite network (I use the past tense because a great deal of restructuring went on since I was there; the name persists but things are quite different these days). 

the wires running along the tracks used by railroads for the signal system were called the code line so though the information now travels in a different way the web site where the details can be found is called www.codeline-telemetry.com. 

for a proof-of-concept demonstration I have temporarily expanded the geographic scope of the application that checks regional signal data for anomalies.  it's a completely insane volume of data.  yesterday it pulled in signal indication messages from 742 railroad control points on four carriers across the eastern US and Canada.  upstairs there are now four computers devoted to the project: two with radios for data collection, one for front ending ten such computers in the midwest and another that's aggregating all of the data into a logfile that will probably hit around 100Mb by midnight.  although the two radio computers are just a few inches away in the rack it can't be bothered to talk to them directly so they are feeding an external aggregator in West Virginia into whose data stream their outputs are blended.  another three such aggregators are hosted by collaborators in Florida and Virginia as well as another sixteen servers from which it is polling directly. 

the machine doing all this is running flat out so I had to suspend the cron job that runs the daily logfile analysis; that gets started by hand on one of the downstairs computers.  when it runs by itself this application is generally remarkably low in bandwidth consumption but for this test it has occasionally come close to saturating the DSL line out of here. 

I'm hoping to run in this mode for a couple more days; if the moving parts can keep functioning through midnight on Monday that should suffice. 

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it was putting the pieces together to make this test possible that has been so distracting.  not so much the computational and network resources; for the most part they were already in place though a certain amount of repurposing was called for.  rather, it was building enough context into which the data can be dropped such that it can have a way to make sense. 

it was years ago when I first learned about the danger of wandering into information space.  the way it works for me is that I have to be able to assimilate the entity relationships of whatever symbolic information I'm working with; it's all highly visual but once the mental data model is in place it becomes possible to manipulate it to find whatever it is I'm looking for.  the process is difficult to describe but suffice it to say that on seeing it a certain film made immediate sense to me.  I don't qualify as a genius, nor as a savant or a polymath.  but data structures have a meaning for me and working with them comes naturally -- but is accompanied by a danger that is real, very real: that of falling into them and not necessarily having a way back out. 
don't ask me how I know this but the answer should be obvious. 

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I'll have more on this later, probably in a few days. 

[OT from cottage renovations]
[HTML <acronym> tags in use -- hover your mouse over any in the text for English translation]

listening on the road channel a couple of days ago, an EB CSX freight was calling the AU dispatcher to report that the EAS at Derwood was dropping to red but then coming back to green while he was approaching.  the dispatcher said he would pass the word to the signal maintainers but hadn't noticed anything unusual on his model board.

pointing the mouse to the Derwood station name on the ATCSmon display I clicked the mouse wheel (it works as a middle button) to bring up the strip chart window, a visual summary of recent data traffic to and from the control point.  sure enough, the 2EGK bits were interspersed with 2TEK bits until the train entered the plant whereupon the 2EGK bit dropped, a 2STZ control came through and a 2TK bit came up.  those TEK bits in the data stream meant that the control point was intermittently reporting that it was running time on the signal for that track (in between reports that a signal was being displayed).

even though this may be the point where geekery crosses over into wankery, I do find it fascinating to watch and listen at once: virtual railfanning at its multimedia best.