I've heard of them using digital for various support comms, but I haven't seen anything to indicate they are going to use digital for actual voice comms in the trains... Even though that rumor seems to keep coming up.
It seems to me that would be quite a big undertaking. You would basically have to have the entire system switch nationwide, due to interoperability issues. Either that, or have equipment that will do both. I don't know, it seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to, and I'm not clear on what the real gain would be. They're already going to double the channel assignments by splitting the channels. That's technically been available for sometime now, but I don't believe they've even made use of that yet. I think most industries just like to cover themselves with stuff like this, so they set it up for the 'possibility' of something happening, just in case. But often times, it never does. UPS never did use the 220 freqs taken from the ham band. And I think the venders themselves start a lot of this stuff up with digital, hoping that they can cause a stampede effect.
Dave
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