Originally Posted by labrat78

Its a dirty little secret that most professional railroaders are closet foamers. I guess I am proof since I photograph the things on my days off. Yes, railroads have been at the forefront of technology, especially when it comes to communications. We ditched out line wire and telegraph in the early sixties and replaced them all with microwave towers, up and down the line. Since then we have upgraded those installations to digital, along with using fiber optic for a backup and recently finished installing WLAN for all the signal control points. The stuff is pretty much like a home or business router on steroids and acid at the same time. Most of it runs in the 900MHz band though for greater distance.

In 29 years I have seen it go from analog microwave to this and I wonder what it will be like when I retire in about a dozen years or so. Even the remote locomotives for the yard and the road, what we call distributed power, all runs the same way as a LAN over UHF radio. It wasn't this way thirty years ago.