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Newkid92 t1_jecr83t wrote

Reply to comment by trs21219 in Hours of Ohio train derailment footage lost after being ‘overwritten’ by newsspotter

Yes, what is also interesting is that they don't have a backup system uploaded to a cloud of some sort. I'm sure as a big company like that they record for a reason i.e. accidents/ lawsuits. I wonder if a look at past lawsuits/reports could prove otherwise, because this definitely isn't the first derailment.

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trs21219 t1_jecxvvo wrote

Cloud systems aren't really feasible for something like this. It would require uploading over LTE/5G and would eat a metric crap ton of data across their entire fleet as they are running those trains basically 24/7/365.

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Newkid92 t1_jecynae wrote

I'm not disagreeing with you, i just find it odd. Being that they do know it only records for so long, i wonder if they have an established policy in-house on collecting that since it could be so vital.

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trs21219 t1_jed1m6j wrote

It sounds like their policy was to flag the footage of the incident (the 15 mins before until 5 mins after). They still have that part.

It seems like NTSB now wants all of it but they could have had it if they had done their job.

Its kind of funny because I was just watching some reruns of the first 48 with my wife the other day and the detectives on that show, no matter the department always go for video first thing from businesses, ring cameras, etc because they know it disappears the longer you wait. Why a federal agency investigating a major ecological disaster didnt do the same is beyond me.

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chuckie512 t1_jecyskq wrote

You can batch the upload while you're in the rail yard.

But uploading to a cloud makes sense too. With all the diesel in the locomotive, the local storage is at risk during an incident.

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trs21219 t1_jeczj4o wrote

The local storage can be redundant SSDs inside of a fire proof enclosure like the "black box" airplanes have. From all of the derailments I have seen in the news in the past few years, i don't think I have seed a locomotive being destroyed.

Batch upload at the rail yard would be probably a huge infrastructure project, especially in remote areas with shitty internet. You'd have to place access points all over the yard, run fiber back to a central point, and then have a large amount of bandwidth for a train to upload say 2 days worth of footage from multiple cameras in 1080-4k resolution in under whatever the time it takes them to switch their loads and leave the yard.

But again, none of that matters if NTSB doesn't do their job and actually download the footage when they have the chance. Any cloud / remote backup is going to have a retention window as well where they would delete footage.

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wagsman t1_jee72gu wrote

Trucking companies do it everyday.

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