If you were in a government Cyber-warning center

Sat Apr 27 04:34:10 UTC 2002

You can also add to that:
If the original derailment didn't cut the cable, the subsequent 
construction surely would.
The cable buried is an afterthought, rail repair crews will undoubtedly 
bulldoze things flat and straight, bring in fill and push the debris to one 
side, and get the ballast and rails back in, tamped, and service restored 
as quickly as possible. Over a period of time, after, they will remove and 
scrap, all with big machinery, shipping the repairable to a 
rebuilder...your glass cable doesn't mean an iota to the rail company when 
they need to restore service and get the right-of-way open. An outage of 
this nature on a main track may take days to a month or so to be ready for 
a crew to re-install the glass, splice and restore that path.

Needless to say, this is what redundancy is all about...

At 20:54 4/26/02 -0600, you wrote:

>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.
>--
>***************************************************************************