The freight engines don't have any high speed "cruise control" that I know
of. I think that it would be too hard to control train speeds as the weight
and length vary so much from train to train. I imagine with a computer
program that has all the terrain of a given railroad and speed restrictions,
cruise conrtrol may be possible when interfaced with a signal system, but I
know next to nothing about computers, so I'm not sure that something like
that is possible.
However, I had a trip recently where we made it as far south as Kankakee on a
nips empty train, and we deadheaded to Champaign on #59. My conductor and I
rode the head end of the train. The lead locomotive was one of the GE
Genesis types and lo and behold it had a cruise control system.
All the engineer had to do was advance the throttle to 8 and the train would
get up to 79 and stay there all by itself. This system compensated for the
grades all by itself with a 1-2 mph variation above and below 79 mph. The
engineer manually set the brakes for all speed restrictions and stops. It
seemed to work very much like the systems in automobiles. It was pretty neat.
Dave
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