Quote:
Originally Posted by dcb
are the overhead wire guys in bed with the electric utility? They would have no motivation to upgrade in any event, sans regulation.
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As far as I know, the national railroad may produce it's own power. In recent years it's been selling it's surplus to individual homes.
Some of the problems with introducing new technology are because of labor unions: they are against any kind of change, fearing it will cause job losses, etc. The national railway is grossly overemployed, and producing billions of dept every year. And this
status quo has been for the last 20 years.
One example of this is an archaic law that says that a train with only one engineer in the cabin can't go faster than 130 km/h. There are a few new trains that can go 160, or even 200 km/h, but they were constructed with only one seat in the cabin. Someone came up with the brilliant idea of changing the 50 year old law to account for advances in signalling technology, but the union hushed him arguing that this "would reduce the number of second cabin engineers". There are no second engineers in the first place, since the cabin won't fit them. So, trains are still slowly chugging along.