If you were in a government Cyber-warning center

Sat Apr 27 02:54:10 UTC 2002

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.
-- 
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Joel Baker                           System Administrator - lightbearer.com
lucifer at lightbearer.com              http://users.lightbearer.com/lucifer/