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by persolb 331 days ago
Yeah. Exactly. The consequence of this club is either:

1) The brakes take an extra couple seconds to apply (note: this is only used on long trains… so stopping is over a minute anyway)

2) The emergency brakes apply. This is considered a safe condition, and for Positive Train Control is considered the ‘safe state’.

If someone tries to utilize this vulnerability, the EOT device will be shutoff. On the few tracks where it’s actually required, there are mitigations to still operate safely.

This would be really easy to annoy a single train crew. This would be really hard to do to geographically diverse trains.