Federal rail safety mandate slow in being fulfilled

CEDAR RAPIDS — A federal board that investigates transportation crashes said railroads should not delay installing a safety technology that could save lives that have been lost to human error-caused train crashes — even though Congress pushed back the implementation deadline three years.

Positive train control uses a series of fixed antennae, digital radios and global positioning to communicate a train's location, direction and speed and automatically brake if it is going too fast. The system is intended to cut down the estimated 4 percent of rail crashes caused by human error, particularly train-on-train collisions, derailments and speeding into work areas or unauthorized zones.

'PTC is a proven technology that can save lives,' National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) spokesman Eric Weiss wrote in an email. 'While this legislation extends the deadline, it should not relieve the railroads of their obligation to deploy PTC as soon as possible.'

In 2008, Congress mandated by Dec. 31 of this year the installation of positive train control on 60,000 miles of track (out of 140,000 miles total) carrying passengers or toxic inhalation hazards such as chlorine gas and anhydrous ammonia, which is used for farm fertilizer.

This followed a series of fatal crashes, including a 2008 head-on collision between a Union Pacific freight train and a Metrolink passenger rail in Chatsworth, Calif., that killed 25 people. The Metrolink engineer was texting and failed to stop at a signal, according to the NTBS. PTC would have prevented the crash, according to the board.

Since 2004, the NTBS has investigated 30 freight and passenger rail accidents, which would have been prevented by PTC, according to the organization. The crashes caused 69 deaths and 1,200 injuries, including eight deaths and 100 injuries from a 2015 derailment of an Amtrak traveling at more than 100 mph around a bend in Philadelphia.

The Federal Railroad Administration calls PTC the 'single-most important rail safety development in more than a century,' and the NTBS has been calling for improved safety requirements for rail for decades.

As the Dec. 31 deadline approached, it was becoming clear only a small percentage of railroads would be in compliance by the deadline.

The Association of American Railroads projects by the end of 2015, 14 percent of the 60,000 route miles will have PTC (out of 140,000 miles systemwide), 31 percent of 22,000 locomotives will be equipped, 30 percent of the 100,000 employees requiring training will be PTC-qualified, 69 percent of the 22,600 trackside signal systems will be PTC ready, and 63 percent of the 4,000 base station radios will be installed.

The Federal Railroad Administration announced in August it intended to enforce penalties on railroads not in compliance, noting some railroads weren't providing required information or stepping up efforts to comply.

Railroads threatened to stop carrying certain material and discontinue passenger service in order to ensure compliance. Industries, including agriculture, began recognizing possible disruptions.

'Railroads are already communicating to their customers that they will no longer accept toxic materials on their networks in early December in order to ensure that railroads have no such materials on their networks once the December 31st deadline is reached,' Mike Steenhoek, executive director of the Soy Transportation Council and a member of Iowa's Freight Advisory Council, warned his coalition last month.

In late October, Congress — under pressure from railroads and industries — extended the deadline by three years to 2018.

Railroads applauded the extension and said they were committed to comply, but noted several hurdles, some of them external, which have slowed implementation.

'Our primary challenge is PTC is not an off-the-shelf technology,' said Callie Hite, a spokeswoman for Union Pacific, the largest railroad in Iowa with 1,291 track miles. 'Much of the technology didn't exist before the idea of PTC came about. We really have had to develop much of the technology ourselves.'

Railroads also must work with the Federal Communications Commission to acquire spectrum to support electronic communication. FCC has been delayed in processing the wave of requests, which has slowed putting up antennae in the right of way along railroad tracks, Hite said.

Keith Creel, president and chief operating officer of Canadian Pacific, which is Iowa's second-largest railroad, articulated the challenges faced by the industry in a September letter to Sen. John Thune, chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

'Development of the new technology, particularly mission-critical software, has proved extremely challenging and taken longer than estimated,' Creel wrote, noting the company had spent $230 million and hundreds of thousands of hours worked toward implementation. 'This is due in part to the unavailability of spectrum with ample bandwidth on a nationwide basis.'

Ed Greenberg, a spokesman for Association of American Railroads, said the industry has made progress but acknowledged much work needs to be done.

'The rail industry will continue going all out to ensure PTC is fully developed, installed, tested and validated so that when this complex technology is turned on across the country, it works and enhances safety,' he said, noting a 30 percent to 40 percent failure rate in what is being tested today.

Despite promises in transparency, examining the progress can be hard to do.

Iowa has 18 railroads covering 3,854 miles of mainline tracks, which carried 5.6 million tons of hazardous commodities annually as of 2013.

Union Pacific reports investing $1.8 billion systemwide on PTC, with plans to spend another $200 million this year, and has 1,000 employees working on PTC implementation, Hite said. In Iowa, the railroad must install PTC on 634 miles of track.

Through November 2015, the company has completed installation of track side signal equipment, which is technology-integrated into the signals and signal sheds along the right of way, on 55 percent of required tracks. It also has completed 93 percent of track side telecommunications locations, which include wayside radios that communicate between signal equipment and locomotives and base station radios that relay data from the UP's Harriman Dispatching Center to locomotives, Hite said.

While the FRA has collected data from railroads, the information is not tracked by location. Iowa's largest railroads — including Union Pacific, Canadian National, Canadian Pacific and BNSF — did not respond to questions about where it has been installed in Iowa.

The Iowa Department of Transportation Office of Rail is not involved in monitoring PTC implementation, according to director Tammy Nicholson.

National compliance by Iowa's largest rail carriers

• BNSF: 2,389 locomotives equipped out of 6,000, 2,389 locomotive radios equipped out of 6,000, 19,886 track miles mapped out of 22,050, spectrum has been obtained, and safety plan has been submitted.

• Canadian National: 12 locomotives equipped out of 1,546, 72 locomotive radios equipped out of 1,546, 257 track miles mapped out of 4,300, spectrum has been obtained, and safety plan has not been submitted.

• Canadian Pacific: 146 locomotives equipped out of 1,000, 75 locomotive radios equipped out of 1,000, 1,515 track miles mapped out of 2,211, spectrum has been obtained, and safety plan has not been submitted.

• Union Pacific: 0 locomotives equipped out of 6,532, 1,855 locomotive radios equipped out of 6,532, 21,150 track miles mapped out of 21,150, spectrum has been obtained, and safety plan has not been submitted.

Source: Reported to the FRA as of July 2015