PTC Deadline Could Stop All Trains.
Oh, please! Not another crisis! Well, probably not, but the potential is there for an end, albeit temporary, to a lot of passenger rail service in the country.
It all goes back to 2008 and a suburb of Los Angeles when a Metrolink commuter train ran through a stop signal and collided with a freight. It was bad. The accident killed 25 people and injured 135. It also caused the federal government to mandate the installation of a sophisticated system known as Positive Train Control or PTC for short.
PTC uses computers—what doesn’t?—and a Global Positioning System (GPS) to monitor the progress of a train and, among other things, automatically stop it if, for instance, it runs through a red light. The trouble is, PTC is expensive: lots of sophisticated equipment has to be installed both at trackside and in every locomotive cab.
Furthermore, the government said the railroads had to have PTC installed and working by the end of next year. At the time, the railroads said it would be difficult to meet that deadline; now they’re saying it’s impossible. And if the government doesn’t grant an extension, when we arrive at New Year’s Day of 2017, the freight railroads are saying they will not allow passenger trains to run on their tracks. While it’s possible that the slower freights would be allowed to keep running, Amtrak and commuter trains would certainly be shut down. Furthermore, there are cynics among us who are muttering that the anti-Amtrak elements in Congress could seize upon this issue as an excuse to . . .
It’s easy for the government to say the freights have got to have PTC up and running by such-and-such a date. But that meant someone would have to design, manufacture and install something like 20 new components. Then there is the compatibility issue. A long-distance Amtrak train my run over track owned and maintained by four or five different railroads and the PTC equipment installed in the head end of the Amtrak locomotive would have to work with the PTC systems each of those railroads had installed. (The word someone dreamed up for that is “interoperability”.
Of course, no one thinks this crisis will actually occur because everyone thinks Congress will amend the law to extend the deadline. On the other hand, who knows what this bunch will do? In fact, as I write this, a bunch of those bozos are actually trying too shut down the government. If they’ll do that, I suppose they wouldn’t even blink at stopping all passenger trains.
In respect to my commentaries in industry publications, what is key here is quite simple and obvious–the continued pattern of Federal bias against the railroads perpetuating an unleveled playing field by favoring railroads’ competitors–air, trucking, barge/inland waterways. This issue goes far beyond the Feds using our tax dollars to build-and maintain competitive infrastructure–the interstate highway and air systems.
Explicitly, when there was a mid-air collision in 1956 between two passenger planes over the Grand Canyon, Eisenhower ordered Congress to fund the creation of the Air Traffic Control System. JFK ordered additional funding after the mid-air crash over NYC in 1961. Yet, after the Chatsworth (CA) wreck in 2008 between a Metrolink commuter and UP freight, Congress voted to create an unfunded mandate for the railroads, Amtrak, and commuters to embrace PTC by 2015.
Why would Congress demand the railroads to, in essence, defer their own capitalization program to self-finance a congressional mandate, when this was never required of the air or truck industries. Just remember, when it comes to the excessive tax support by the Feds and states of just the interstate highways, has anybody ever seen a snowplow operated by Megabus or Schneider..?
Bullseye!
The most irritating thing is that there is no crisis here to solve; there are so many ways billions of dollars could be better spent. Railroads are not dangerous; and per-passenger-mile a train is ~8x safer than an automobile. There is no safety problem – unless we are willing to first overlook massive safety problems throughout all the rest of our infrastructure. The PTC requirements are the result of the inability to do math, the deadline should be pushed out to some indefinite date in the distant future.
I don’t agree with you entirely, Mr Williams. Yes, railroads are infinitely safer than road transportation, but to keep its edge, it has to keep up with new and safer systems. PTC offers more advantages than just increased safety, if correctly implemented, it can increase capacity and speed, too. Plus, it helps muster support with the communities railways are passing through. Already, some towns are lobbying to get the rails out of their town centre, afraid of another tragedy as in Lac-Mégantic. PTC can help to restore trust with the railroads. PTC is a good investment, and it should be implemented, but I agree the deadline is too sharp.
Even if the deadline was too sharp, I can’t help but feel some operators dragged their feet, and I believe penalties should be put in place for those who did.