Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Sakthimm 867 days ago
Won't a solenoid lock with microcontroller circuitry have a higher risk of failure due to water damage, power surges, and other factors(software bugs, hackers, cosmic rays!), in addition to wear and tear of a mechanical lock?
1 comments
gumby 867 days ago
Probably not for some of the reasons described. The maintenance issues are part of the customer TCO.

Nobody (neither mfr nor customer) takes this path for the sex appeal. This is a B2B product (train car) so BOM and TCO drive everything.

link
kwhitefoot 867 days ago
The problem here is that the customer is not the passenger.
link
gumby 867 days ago
Well, it’s not such a big problem as it is in, say, health care.

It’s in the train co’s interest to have working toilets (not too many, because they displace seats but some) and have them reliable and easy to maintain (else costs go up, maybe even they need more per train). This is why they care about a denial of service attack (btw an electronic one can tell the conductor when the toilet is locked for a grossly atypical duration).

So to that degree the interest of the carrier and the passenger are aligned. This applies to most of the carriage decisions (robust seating, working doors and brakes, and so on).

link
Beldin 867 days ago
> It’s in the train co’s interest ...

But the if the trains pass first inspection, then it no longer is a development issue but a maintenance issue. [1]

It's not as if train companies can afford to run a statistically significant number of carriages from different suppliers to see which one gives them the actual best bang for buck 5 years down the road.

[1] Rule-proving exception: the Fyra trains. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyra

The short version: high speed trains failed and were eventually returned (2014) to the manufacturer for ~2/3rds of new price. (That's the exception part.) There have not been high speed trains on this traject since. (That's the rule-conforming part.)

link