I found the 2009 Computerworld article worth reading too.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9134771/The_lost_NASA...

Sydney Australia. I suspect the harbour's beaches are bit warmer than the Donau too.

I haven't looked for others but Australia has a convenient calculator: http://www.rba.gov.au/calculator/annualPreDecimal.html

1 pound 10 shillings in 1945 (which would convert to $1.50 in 1965 with the changeover to decimal) becomes $98.74 in 2013. Ouch!

The control of the train itself is easy. Simulations abound for this purpose. The GE's and Siemons of this world wouldn't hesitate to implement them if there weren't other significant rail context specific issues, such as the human environment comment above. The difference is that it's not a human vs human driver problem but a schedule design and human making bad scheduling decisions now that the trains are running late, implementation problem.

Furthermore, train drivers are cheap (compared with other infrastructure investments) and relatively efficient as they can be skilfully taught to drive according to a plan (compared with your fellow road commuters). Without other investments to tell the driver or the computer that they can drive faster/closer to the train in front at most railways are only likely to see efficiency gains (lower power/diesel usage) but struggle to drive those trains to denser schedules. It will happen for non-capacity reasons such as inter network usage, and safety to prevent trains from speeding around curves and falling off.

I expect the challenge will ease partly due to implementing automation of the management to provide safety at increased traffic densities and provide online decision support analysis. Later versions of ETCS could an example of part of that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Train_Control_System Example of some of the budgets involved: http://ec.europa.eu/transport/themes/infrastructure/news/ten...)

Once a future version of that is done (ATMS in Australia for example), driverless tech will be much closer to being the low hanging fruit.

Also worth noting, Adam Schneider's GPS Visualiser website is excellent for quick elevation lookups globally.

Handy for me as Geoscience Australia (another good resource) unfortunately charge for their DEM data.

http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/elevation http://www.ga.gov.au/