History
Since the 1960s, railroad distributed power technology has been dominated by one company, Harris Controls (originally Harris Corporation—Controls and Composition Division, later purchased by General Electric, and now known as GE Transportation Systems Global Signalling), who have manufactured and marketed a patented radio-control system known as Locotrol that is the predominant (perhaps only?) wireless distributed power system in use today around the world.
With its origins in the early days of SCADA technology for the remote control of pipelines and electric utilities, and from an early concept of Southern Railway President D.W. Brosnan, Locotrol was a product of the North Electric Company (Galion, Ohio) which was later purchased by Radiation Inc. (Melbourne, Florida) and—in turn—purchased by Harris Corporation (also headquartered in Melbourne, FL), and was first tested on the Southern Railway in 1963. The first production Locotrol was installed on the Southern Railway in 1965.
In the early years of this technology, Wabco also had—for a relatively brief period—a competing system called 'RMU' (Remote Multiple Uniter) which was installed on a few North American railroads. However this system did not prevail and soon went out of production. Prior to the advent by North Electric of the proprietary 'LOCOTROL' name, the product was referred to as 'RCE' (Radio Controlled Equipment) or 'RCS' (Radio Control System) and the lead and remote units as 'master' and 'slave'. The colloquial 'master' and 'slave' terms, though, were not formally used by the manufacturer. In some U.S. railroad parlance, Locotrol trains are referred to as 'radio trains'.
Read more about this topic: Distributed Power
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Indeed, the Englishman’s history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)