Tag Archives: Positive Train Control

Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement Systems, AMTRAK, Derailment, Insurance and liability, Positive Train Control, Rail Safety, Train speed

Two months since Amtrak 188 derailed, what’s changed and why big problems remain: ‘It’s actually cheaper to kill people’

Repost from BillyPenn.com

NTSB_2015_Philadelphia_train_derailment_3
Philadelphia Amtrak 188 derailment. NTSB

Two months since Amtrak 188 derailed, what’s changed and why big problems remain: ‘It’s actually cheaper to kill people’

By Anna Orso, July 7, 2015, 9:00 am

In the two months since Amtrak 188 derailed in Philadelphia, killing eight people and injuring hundreds, the train giant has said that it’s making a number of changes to ensure better railroad safety. But is it really doing much beyond what it was already supposed to before the crash?

That depends on who you ask. Amtrak says it’s made a number of technological changes in wake of the crash to improve safety features. However, that admission came after the National Transportation Safety Board basically said the crash could have been prevented if Amtrak had it’s stuff together.

The major feature on railroad safety advocates’ list for decades is a way to automatically slow down trains on certain segments of track. Called Positive Train Control technology, federal regulators had mandated that all passenger train companies have it installed by the end of this year. The NTSB said this would have prevented the train, operated by engineer Brandon Bostian, from hitting 106 mph as it flew around a rated-for-50-mph curve in Philly.

Amtrak will be done installing PTC by the end of December, thus making the deadline and becoming the first “Class 1″ railroad company to do so. Spokesman Craig Schulz says the company is in the process of putting in “Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement Systems” to ensure trains are operated at safe speeds along the Northeast Corridor, spending more than $110 million since 2008 to install PTC.

The company also is quick to point out that in the immediate aftermath of the crash, it installed (read: fixed) a “code change point” in the signal system on the eastbound tracks just west of the Frankford Curve, meaning that trains traveling east from Philadelphia to New York approach the curve at 45 mph in accordance with the speed limit there. They’re not so quick to point out that this technology was previously required.

Amtrak, according to Schulz, has also committed to installing inward-facing video cameras in its fleet of ACS-64 locomotives in service on the Northeast Corridor by the end of this year and will comply with additional Federal Railroad Administration regulations released earlier this year. Cameras like this would have shown what, for instance, Bostian was doing as the train hit the curve at nearly double the recommended speed.

But the lawyers circling this case say these actions are a day late and a dollar short.

Bob Pottroff, a Kansas-based attorney who’s a railroad safety expert, is consulting with several of the personal injury lawyers who are representing victims in lawsuits against Amtrak and other parties. A number of those court actions have already been filed, including two of behalf of families whose loved ones were killed in the crash.

It’s expected the lawsuits against Amtrak will be consolidated, and the company will only be liable for a total of $200 million because of a cap put in place by Congress in 1997. This means that no matter how many people are killed or injured in a train crash, Amtrak will never be asked to pay up more than $200 million in total.

Pottroff thinks removing this cap would be the best way to get large railroad companies to stop dragging their feet on installing new and better technologies that he advocates should have been installed years ago.

“If you really want to scare the hell out of the railroad industry, the first thing to do is remove the damage cap,” he said. “They’re saying ‘we’re never going to have to pay more than $200 million,’ so any project that costs more doesn’t make sense.

“The failing state of our railroad infrastructure would probably cost closer to $200 billion to fix. It’s actually cheaper to kill people.”

And for Amtrak, someone has to be concerned about saving money. The transportation giant is staring down potentially massive cuts to its federal funding, after $270 million in cuts were approved by the House along party lines right after the crash. Democrats and safety advocates have rallied against slashing of funding.

Meanwhile, Amtrak is still focused on making train trips — especially along the Northeast Corridor which had 11.6 million riders in fiscal year 2014 — faster. Slowing down trains when they go around curves would counter those goals.

Pottroff said his fear is that Amtrak can make promises in wake of accidents, but he says the FRA hasn’t set up penalties for what could happen if the company doesn’t follow through with regulations in a timely manner. He says there aren’t any checks on the company.

“Nothing really has changed,” he said. “Until the FRA grows some teeth, they’re going to be a mouthpiece. We will go on hiding the ball on the real causes of problems until we have government oversight that is effective.”

Train crew size

Why rail companies are pushing for one-person train crews

Repost from Fortune

Why rail companies are pushing for one-person train crews

By David Z. Morris, June 11, 2015, 8:17 AM EDT
A BNSF Railway train hauls crude oil near Wolf Point, Mont. Photograph by Matthew Brown — AP
As technology advances, train crews shrink. But is safety on the line?

Most freight rail lines still operate with two-person crews, a minimum is now enshrined in labor contracts held by the United Transportation Union and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. But railways, citing in part the rise of automated safety systems, are pushing to change that.

“Most rail corporations would like to get rid of as many workers as possible,” says Ron Kaminkow, general secretary of Railroad Workers United, a group that opposes smaller crews. “Right now, they believe they can operate trains with a single employee.”

Both sides claim safety is their main priority, but there are clearly other motivations—unions want to preserve jobs, while railways are striving to cut labor costs.

Regulators seem to be siding with labor on the question of staffing. The Office of Management and Budget is currently reviewing a proposed Federal Railroad Administration rule that would require at last two railroad employees on a train at all times.

The move to one-person crews would be the culmination of a long process. Mirroring sectors from manufacturing to stock brokerage, technology has allowed the rail industry to shed jobs even as revenues rise. Since the 1960s, innovations including diesel engines, better radios, and wayside monitoring gear has meant less need for warm bodies. U.S. railway employment declined 3% in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available. Those changes and more, says Kaminkow, led to the standardization of two-man freight train crews in the 1990s.

But the replacement of workers by technology has coincided with a massive improvement in railway safety. According to data from George Bibel, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of North Dakota, derailments have decreased from over 3,000 in 1980 to less than 500 in 2010. A recent Northwestern University study found similar steep declines in rail fatalities.

Nonetheless, rail workers say that reducing crews to a single operator is a step too far. The RWU argues that routine operations like attaching and detaching cars from a train would be unsafe without a team able to see surroundings.

There are more dramatic cases, such as the May 12th derailment of Amtrak 188. Though the incident is still under investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board has looked into the possibility that engineer Brandon Bostian was either distracted by his phone or incapacitated as the train hit a curve at more than twice the posted speed limit. In those scenarios, the fatal crash might have been prevented by a second engineer.

Another tragic incident occurred when a solo engineer improperly parked the train for the night above Lac-Mégantic, Quebec in 2013. It rolled into downtown Lac-Mégantic and exploded, killing 47 and destroying much of the town’s central district. That train was operated by a smaller line not subject to the labor contracts in effect for so-called Class I carriers.

Kaminkow says that freight engineers operate on unpredictable schedules, generating fatigue that can lead to this sort of mistake.

Unless and until the proposed FRA rule passes, there is no national rule on train staffing levels. U.S. states including Washington, Utah, and Iowa are considering their own rules, but these could be vulnerable to challenge under interstate commerce law.

Regardless of the FRA rule, technology will continue to erode rail jobs. With BNSF piloting a program to inspect rail using drones, track crews may shrink. And though Positive Train Control has been touted primarily as a safety measure, Kaminkow says the technology is a major step towards something more radical.

“If PTC comes online,” he says, “[Railways] will then point out that the train is basically capable of running itself.”

From there, driverless trains would be possible, at least in theory.

AMTRAK, Commuter train, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Positive Train Control

Most Commuter Rails Won’t Meet Deadline For Mandated Safety Systems

Repost from National Public Radio

Most Commuter Rails Won’t Meet Deadline For Mandated Safety Systems

By David Schaper, June 03, 2015 3:48 AM ET
Despite Congress mandating all railroads be equipped with a Positive Train Control system by the end of the year, Chicago's Metra system isn't expected to reach that goal until 2019. Most commuter trains won't meet the deadline.
Despite Congress mandating all railroads be equipped with a Positive Train Control system by the end of the year, Chicago’s Metra system isn’t expected to reach that goal until 2019. Most commuter trains won’t meet the deadline. M. Spencer Green/AP

Many investigators say Positive Train Control (PTC), an automated safety system, could have prevented last month’s Amtrak train derailment. Amtrak officials have said they will have PTC installed throughout the northeast corridor by the end of this year, which is the deadline mandated by Congress.

But the vast majority of other commuter railroad systems, which provided nearly 500 million rides in 2014, won’t be able to fully implement positive train control for several more years.

On the southern edge of downtown Chicago, a few dozen commuter trains idle as they prepare to take thousands of people from their jobs downtown to their homes in city neighborhoods, and suburbs both near and far. Just behind the tracks is a nondescript, two-story brick building that houses the control center for all these rail lines, and the brains of what will be Metra’s positive train control system.

“Out of this building, we control the Metra electric district, the Rock Island,” Sal Cuevas, chief dispatcher of the control facility. “Over 300, 350, maybe 400 trains out of this facility that we control.”

That’s about half of the commuter trains Metra moves into and out of Chicago each day. Cuevas is tracking their movement, their speed and any potential problems or delays they might encounter, from bad weather to maintenance crews. It’s done in coordination with the 500 freight trains that move through Chicago every day.

Getting positive train control on line won’t make his job any easier, but Cuevas says it will make the movement of all those trains safer.

“Integrating that system with our current train control system will hopefully minimize incidents,” he says.

But that won’t be happening for some time.

Positive Train Control is a system that integrates computer, satellite and radio technologies to slow down or stop a train if the engineer becomes incapacitated or makes a mistake, such as missing a stop signal or going too fast around a curve.

Seven years ago, Congress mandated all freight and passenger railroads implement positive train control by the end of this year. But Metra’s executive director Don Orseno says Chicago’s commuter trains won’t make the deadline, and it won’t even be close.

“Our expectation for Metra to be fully operational is in 2019,” he says. “There’s a lot of reasons why its taking so long. Number one: it wasn’t invented.”

Orseno says railroads have had to develop PTC from scratch and it’s a very complicated system. Information about track conditions, speed limits, the movement of other trains and all kinds of other data has to be downloaded into computers in the railroads’ control centers and in the locomotives.

Those computers have to be able to communicate with every track signal and every other train. So there’s new signaling equipment to install, new radios, new computer hardware and new software to run it all, because these positive train control systems have to be fully inter-operable between all the railroads and all their equipment.

In Chicago, the nation’s busiest rail hub, that’s 1,300 and passenger trains a day.

“We operate the most complex system in the country, there’s no question about that,” Orseno says.

He adds that in mandating positive train control and imposing the December 2015 deadline, Congress provided almost no funding for it.

“The system comes at a very expensive cost,” he says. “We’re looking anywhere from about $350 million for this system, and you’re talking about commuter rail service. There’s not that kind of money out there.”

And it’s not just Chicago’s commuter rail agency that’s struggling to build, fund and implement positive train control. Most commuter trains across the country won’t have it by the end of this year.

“About 29 percent of our systems anticipate they’ll be able to make the goal this year, about seven systems in the country,” says Michael Melaniphy, president and CEO of the American Public Transportation Association.

Melaniphy says some commuter rail agencies will need another three to five years to complete PTC installations because of the scale and complexity of the systems and the resources needed.

“There are only so many people that are experts in this area,” he says. “They can only produce so many of the radio sets that are needed and the spectrum that’s needed to run those radios in a given time.”

Acquiring that radio spectrum for PTC has been especially difficult for commuter railroads.

“Many of the operators will be able to obtain in some segments but maybe not along the entire corridor,” Melaniphy says. “They have to figure out who owns the spectrum in a given corridor and negotiate with them to either sell it or lease it.”

Melaniphy is hoping Congress will allow the FCC to provide commuter railroads with the radio spectrum they need for free. He’s also asking Congress to pay at least some of the estimated $3.5 billion cost of PTC, and extend the deadline to give commuter and freight railroads more time to implement a safety system they all agree they want and need to implement.

Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, High Hazard Flammable Trains (HHFTs), Positive Train Control, Train crew size

Two-person train crews necessary for safety, lawmakers say

Repost from Lincoln Journal Star

Two-person train crews necessary for safety, lawmakers say

By Zach Pluhacek | Lincoln Journal Star, May 28, 2015 1:45 pm
A BNSF Railway locomotive pulls cars of coal through Lincoln in January. FRANCIS GARDLER/Journal Star file photo

Trains need two-person crews to help prevent disasters like the 2013 derailment and explosion of a crude oil train that killed 47 people in Quebec, some Nebraska lawmakers argued Thursday.

The Federal Railroad Administration has signaled plans to require two-man crews on trains carrying oil and freight trains, which is the industry’s standard practice, but its proposed rule hasn’t been issued.

Rail lines would like to switch to a crew of one on most freight engines as they equip trains with positive train control, a new federally mandated wireless safety system that can force a train to stop automatically to avoid a potential crash.

“This is a risky development for public safety in Nebraska, particularly in light of the hazardous types of freight that are being hauled through our state,” said Sen. Al Davis of Hyannis on Thursday.

Nebraska is home to the nation’s two biggest railroads, Union Pacific, based in Omaha, and BNSF Railway, which is owned by Berkshire Hathaway in Omaha. UP operates the world’s largest railroad classification yard, the Bailey Yard in North Platte, and BNSF has extensive operations in Lincoln and the rest of Nebraska.

Davis sponsored a measure (LB192) this year that would have outright required two-person crews in Nebraska, but it failed to advance from the Legislature’s Transportation and Telecommunications Committee.

Instead, lawmakers passed a nonbinding resolution Thursday that doesn’t specifically call for two-person crews, but it urges the Federal Railroad Administration to adopt a rule that “ensures public safety and promotes the efficient movement of freight, while supporting interstate commerce.”

The resolution (LR338) was adopted on a 36-4 vote.

“These trains are some of the heaviest moving things on this planet, and just having one person in charge doesn’t seem to make sense,” said Sen. Ken Haar of Malcolm, who cosigned the resolution.

But Sen. Tyson Larson of O’Neill argued human mistakes are often to blame when tragedy strikes. “Sometimes true safety does lie within automation,” he said.

Union Pacific opposes the resolution because it falsely implies trains are unsafe and ignores collective bargaining deals that have addressed safe train crew sizes for decades, said spokesman Mark Davis.

Two rail unions —  the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen and the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, which represent about 3,700 active members between them — support the resolution.

Cutting down on the number of crew members would almost certainly affect jobs and reduce the number of workers paying into shared retirement plans.

The more critical issue is what happens when a train derails or breaks down, said Pat Pfeifer, state legislative board chairman for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.

One crew member has to remain inside the engine at all times, so without a second person, there’s no one available on scene to help cut a crossing or take other emergency precautions.

Both unions are also backing a bill in Congress to require two-person crews.

“It’s about public safety; it’s not about jobs,” Pfeifer said.