No, actually, I haven't, not since I was too young to remember. What would be an example of a situation where it's important to rely on human judgment during changing track conditions?
Children playing on the track ahead. Fallen tree across the tracks. Moist leaves on the rails. Road crossing not clear. Probably a bunch of more nuanced things that someone familiar with driving trains would know. You need a wide array of failsafed sensors to replace a human doing all of these. Certainly more than the $100 you suggest.
Hell, in my state, the electronic comms for trains get adversely affected by caterpillar plagues from time to time.
Children playing on the track ahead. Fallen tree across the tracks.
I think we're talking about very different vehicles here. These are avoidable hazards on the road. There is nothing a train driver can do except fill out the necessary paperwork afterwards, and likely spend some time on a therapist's couch.
Not even sound a horn to help alert the kids? Start slowing the train to give the kids more time to alert and escape, or reduce damage to the train and reduce chance of derailment in the case of the tree?
Trains don't stop on a dime, but neither do they take a mile of runway. I've been on a passenger train in the US South that had to do an emergency stop, and it stopped within it's own length.
Not every event that happens uses worst-case data. In any case, while I don't know the actual class of rail where this emergency stop happened, this wiki article[1] suggests that most mainline track in the US is class 4, which allows a max of 80mph for passenger trains.
Out of curiosity, why do you mix metric and imperial in the same context? Stopping distance in metric for a speed in imperial?
British usage is a mess, they were the units I found. I didn't really think about it. I also can no longer find the table of stopping distances I found this morning.
