This allows the reservoirs on the cars to continuously charge making it more difficult to exhaust the air supply used for braking. Further, since the cars can also send their status to the locomotive at the front, the engineer can monitor the state of the train and know at any given time the braking capabilities available. The ECPB can also apply the brakes on the rearmost wagons, slightly before the brakes on the front wagons are applied, which reduces the shock and noise of the wagons bunching up. During initial testing the ECP equipment had software glitches, and problems from the ingress of moisture into the equipment. These have now been resolved. Greater intervals between brake tests are also likely because of the ability of ECP brakes to self-diagnose which should generate large cost savings that will help pay for the system to be installed. The benefits are better control of braking, less equipment wear from pushing and pulling between cars, shorter stopping distance and improved headways. When first developed, ECP brakes needed a number of wires along the train to control solenoids on each wagon to release the brakes, and were not considered economic for freight. This has changed with the introduction of electronic controls, allowing data to be transmitted by two-conductor wire or radio from the locomotive to a microprocessor on each car, where locally powered valves hold the desired pressure in each brake cylinder. ECP can use axle-generated power or wire-distributed power. The Fortescue Railway in Australia uses wire-distributed power at 200 volts direct current. The Fortescue line also places the two brake pipes and single control/power cables on one side of the wagons only, as trains operate only as block loads and the wagons are not normally reversed. Having the wires on one side avoids the need for crew to stoop under the coupling, as would be the case with the normal configuration where the hose and wire cross under the coupling. ECP brakes by the two manufacturers are meant to be mutually compatible. The New York Brake Company, based in Watertown, N.Y., is a unit of Knorr-Bremse, based in Munich, Germany. Wabtec Railway Electronics, or WRE, a unit of Wabtec Corporation, has facilities in Germantown, MD, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In the case of the Fortescue railway, the new ECP brakes are incompatible in several ways. Distributed power is a system where locomotives are coupled in the middle and/or end of a heavy train and remotely controlled originally via radio from the locomotive in the front.