Category Archives: Positive Train Control

Deadline for train safety technology undercut by industry lobbying

Repost from the Washington Post

Deadline for train safety technology undercut by industry lobbying

By Ashley Halsey III and Michael Laris October 25 at 10:13 PM


Until a train barreled off the tracks at 9:26 p.m. on May 12, it had been business as usual on Capitol Hill. Among the bills quietly making their way toward a final vote was one that would postpone by several years a multibillion- dollar safety-enhancement deadline facing the railroad industry.

A victory for the railroads, which maintain one of the most powerful lobbying efforts in Washington, seemed all but certain and likely to be little noticed outside of the industry.

But at that moment, an Amtrak train hurtling toward New York City derailed in Philadelphia, turning into a tangle of crushed metal that killed eight passengers and injured 200 more.

Everyone — including the railroad and federal investigators — agreed that the catastrophe could have been prevented by a single innovation called Positive Train Control (PTC). It’s an automatic braking system that federal regulators call “the single-most important rail safety development in more than a century.”

Now, after a period of reflection and several inquiries, Congress once more is on the brink of postponing the deadline for use of PTC. The proposed delay — until at least 2018 — comes in a new regulatory era for the railroads. Trains filled with volatile natural gas or oil have derailed seven times so far this year, and there is fear that one could cause catastrophic explosions as it passes through a city.

A mighty lobby

What has taken place since May provides insight into the influence that effective lobbyists wield in Washington and how ready access to members of Congress has helped one industry fend off a costly safety mandate.

Seven years ago, Congress ordered railroads to have PTC installed by the end of 2015. It was an uncomfortable deadline for the industry, one it argued should be postponed. PTC technology was too complex, the railroads said, and the $14.7 billion cost to equip freight and commuter lines was prohibitive. Federal economists put the cost-benefit ratio at about 20 to 1.

With their lobbyists in overdrive in 2008, the railroads might have persuaded Congress to delay the mandate. But in the middle of that debate, a head-on train collision in California killed 25 people and injured 102 others. The National Transportation Safety Board said PTC could have prevented the accident, and that moved lawmakers to settle on the Dec. 31, 2015, deadline.

The NTSB says it has investigated 145 rail accidents since 1969 that PTC could have prevented, with a toll of 288 people killed and 6,574 people injured.

In the years since Congress moved to finalize the deadline in 2008, the railroad industry has spent $316 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), to maintain one of the most savvy lobbying teams in Washington. It also contributed more than $24 million during the same period to the reelection efforts of members of Congress, targeting in particular the chairmen and members of key committees that govern its business.

In 2011, the chairman of the House subcommittee on railroads spoke out at a hearing, denouncing the PTC mandate as “an example of regulatory overreach.” He said PTC would have “a very, very small cost-benefit ratio.”

Since then, that chairman, Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), has risen to lead the full House Transportation Committee. Late last month, he introduced a bipartisan bill to extend the PTC deadline to at least 2018, and beyond if the “railroads demonstrate they are facing continued difficulties.”

“Railroads must implement this important but complicated safety technology in a responsible manner, and we need to give them the necessary time to do so,” Shuster said in a statement announcing the bill.

Since taking office in 2001, Shuster has received campaign contributions of $446,079 from the railroad industry, according to the CRP, with $141,484 of it coming in the 2013-2014 election cycle.

Money flows readily to the chairs of powerful committees, but other members of the House Transportation Committee also have benefited from railroad contributions. In the 2013-2014 election cycle, committee members received more than $1.25 million in direct contributions to their campaigns. As of the end of September, the railroads had pitched another $721,742 at the House committee members.

The Senate also has benefited from the railroad industry’s largesse, according to the CRP, with 77 senators receiving nearly $1.5 million in campaign contributions in 2013-2014.

Outside the Beltway, massive contributions may sound like the cost to buy a vote in Congress. But in this era of mega-money politics, campaign contributions win something almost as valuable for railroad lobbyists: face time with a member of the House or Senate.

“They call and they get a member meeting right away,” said a senior Senate staff member familiar with the process. “They have a lot of access.”

And that access brings into play what are described as some of the best lobbyists on Capitol Hill, including several dozen who once were staff members or lawmakers in Congress.

Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the Transportation Committee and the recipient of more than $70,000 in railroad campaign money since 2013, says it’s the footwork of the lobbyists, not the campaign contributions, that wins the day.

“In these days, when you have one Wall Street billionaire spend a million bucks [on a campaign], getting a few thousand dollars from a railroad?” he said with a shrug. “The railroads invest a lot of time on the Hill, and they present a pretty good story for the most part.”

Oil boom raises the stakes

Rail safety has never been a more pressing issue than it is today. So far, the people who have died in U.S. accidents that PTC could have prevented have generally been crew members or passengers. That could change in dramatic, catastrophic fashion.

The number of rail tank cars carrying flammable material in the United States has grown from 9,500 seven years ago to 493,126 last year, thanks to the boom in domestic oil produced in the Bakken oil fields.

Those trains rumble from the oil fields in Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan, Canada, to refineries on the East, West and Gulf coasts.

This year, seven trains have derailed, either leaking their contents or exploding. All of the U.S. explosions have come in remote rural areas where the erupting fireballs did little damage.

Canada was not so lucky.

In July 2013, a runaway freight train carrying 74 tank cars full of Bakken oil derailed in the town of Lac-Mégantic, setting off an inferno that destroyed 30 downtown buildings and killed 47 people.

Coastal states in the United States and the city of Chicago, the most important railroad hub in the nation, have come up with scenarios that depict the potential damage and death tolls should a train explode in different sections of their urban areas. Chicago, fearing that the plan’s release could cause panic, has declined to make it public.

Sarah Feinberg, acting head of the Federal Railroad Administration, says that worries of a train exploding in the middle of a city have caused her sleepless nights.

“If PTC is not fully implemented by Jan. 1, 2016, we can and should expect there to be accidents in the months and years to follow that PTC could have prevented,” she told the House subcommittee on railroads in June.

Bob Gildersleeve Sr., whose son Bob, a Maryland father of two, was killed in the May crash, said rail companies seem to be evading the mandate with an attitude of: “What are you going to do about it?”

“Is a deadline a deadline?” Gildersleeve asked. “We’re talking about fixing things that will eventually save lives, and you guys haven’t done it. Why?”

Many railroads far behind

The railroads’ pitch for an extension — both loudly in the media and quietly to Congress — has been straightforward. Unless the deadline is postponed:

“Transportation of all goods over freight rail grinds to a halt; the U.S. economy loses $30 billion; household incomes drop by $17 billion; 700,000 Americans lose their jobs; millions of commuters are stranded.”

That was the message Oct. 19 when officials from three commuter rail lines and Association of American Railroads President Ed Hamberger held a conference call with reporters to add their voices to a chorus calling for an extension of the PTC deadline.

“If the congressionally mandated deadline of Dec. 31 is not extended, there will be a transportation crisis in the country with severe economic consequences,” said Michael Melaniphy, president of the American Public Transportation Association.

The call had an unintended subtext; all three of the commuter rail lines represented — Virginia Railway Express, Chicago’s Metra system and California’s San Joaquin Regional Rail Commission — said their installation of PTC would be substantially complete by the end of 2015. Amtrak also promises to have PTC operating in the Northeast Corridor rails that it owns by the current deadline.

But most passenger trains operate on track that’s owned by the freight railroads, and the freight rail lines are far from ready to meet the deadline. The freight companies say that without an extension, all traffic on their lines must halt to comply with the law.

The railroads say they’ve already spent $5.7 billion on PTC installation and are committed to finishing the job. None will meet the Dec. 31 deadline.

“It doesn’t matter how fast the bear is that’s chasing you, if you’re running as fast as you can, you can’t run any faster,” said Frank Lonegro, vice president of the freight rail carrier CSX, which operates more than 21,000 miles of rail in 23 eastern states, Washington and two Canadian provinces.

Some of the big railroads have made progress, while others lag far behind.

One of the largest, the BNSF Railway, has made substantial progress. At the other end of the spectrum, Union Pacific hasn’t fully equipped any of its 6,532 locomotives, according to a Federal Railroad Administration report released in August.

“Union Pacific is pretending [the deadline] is not happening,” said one federal official who reviewed the report.

Union Pacific spokesman Aaron Hunt says that “integrating these technologies into an interoperable system is very difficult,” much like merging medical records into a computerized system, and that the company already has made a $1.7 billion investment, including work on the bulk of its locomotives.

Lonegro’s colleague, CSX spokesman Rob Doolittle, said railroad lobbyists have been telling Congress for years that a 2015 deadline wasn’t realistic.

“In the early conversations, before the law was passed, the industry was identifying 2018 as a reasonable deadline that we thought we could achieve,” he said.

A federal official familiar with those 2008 negotiations offered a different perspective.

“The railroads were in the room, and [Association of American Railroads] and those guys were the ones who said 2015 was doable. They did not embrace the deadline, but they said it was a fair bill,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of involvement in the current negotiations.

“It certainly wasn’t, ‘Oh, we sprung it on the railroads at the last minute,’ as they would like some to believe,” said a staff member who was in the room while the deal was being struck.

When the final regulations were put in place nearly six years ago, federal officials tallied up the expected benefits of having the automatic braking system in place. The cost-benefit analysis put a price tag on crumpled locomotives, train delays, track damage, evacuation costs, the cleanup of hazardous spills and other consequences of the crashes that could be prevented.

Government economists also sought to calculate the human costs in injuries and deaths, using a figure of $6 million for each life that was expected to be saved. Over 20 years, there would be $269 million in savings, they figured, or the equivalent of 45 lives spared. There would be another $200 million in prevented injury costs.

In all, they projected $674 million in safety benefits from the PTC system. It would cost $13.2 billion over 20 years, including maintenance costs, to net those benefits, the economists calculated.

That came out to a cost-benefit ratio of about 20 to 1, a disconnect seized on by railroad executives, lobbyists and lawmakers sympathetic to their needs, such as Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.).

“Now, everybody has tremendous sympathy for those families that lost loved ones in the Amtrak accident, but my goodness, now we’re going to be spending billions to make something that already is one of the safest things in the entire world [safer]?” Duncan, who has received $303,250 in railroad campaign support during a 27-year career in the House, said at a June hearing. “And I’m thinking that we would be better off to spend those billions in many, many other ways — cancer research, and everything else.”

But federal rail officials and some outside experts argue that the technology needed to prevent crashes ultimately can transform the future of railroading. More frequent trains, more efficiently deployed across the country, could move more goods while cutting down on expensive fuel costs, dramatically increasing potential benefits.

Some industry executives have embraced this future, while others have pushed back. In a conference call with Wall Street analysts just 19 days before the Amtrak derailment, Union Pacific’s president and chief executive, Lance M. Fritz, predicted Congress would extend the deadline, adding that his company’s lobbyists were “giving feedback and input into our thoughts to help navigate that process.”

Dan Keating contributed to this report.

Lawmakers Press Railroad Nominee on Safety Deadline

Repost from the New York Times

Lawmakers Press Railroad Nominee on Safety Deadline

By Ron Nixon, Sept. 17, 2015
An Amtrak train traveling from Penn Station in New York to Penn Station in Newark in August. There is a Dec. 31 deadline for railroads to start using positive train control technology, which increases safety. Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s nominee to lead the Federal Railroad Administration faced tough questioning by lawmakers on Thursday about the rail industry’s contention that it cannot meet a year-end deadline to install a safety technology meant to keep trains from derailing.

Sarah Feinberg, 37, who was nominated by Mr. Obama in May, has been acting administrator of the agency for about nine months. During that time, there have been several train crashes attributed to excessive speeds, including in May, when an Amtrak passenger train derailed in Philadelphia, killing eight people and injuring 200.

Under questioning by a Senate panel weighing her confirmation, Ms. Feinberg said the railroad administration would enforce the 2008 law that set Dec. 31 of this year as the deadline to have railroads install the technology, known as positive train control.

“On Jan. 1, we will enforce the deadline and the law,” Ms. Feinberg said. She said the agency would work with the rail companies to help them with technical and financial challenges they face in trying to install the safety technology. But she emphasized, “We do not have the authority to extend the deadline.” That authority belongs to Congress.

The deadline to install positive train control, which dominated the questions at the hearing, has become a contentious issue. Some members of Congress have proposed pushing back the deadline. A Senate bill passed in July would extend it to 2018. But many safety advocates say the industry has known of the deadline for years and should be able to install the technology on time.

A report on Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that no railroad would be able to fully install the technology by the end of the year. The investigators recommended that Congress extend the deadline. Many railroad operators say they will refuse to carry crude oil or hazardous chemicals after Jan. 1 if Congress does not do so.

At the hearing, Ms. Feinberg received tough questioning from Democrats and Republicans, who asked if the agency had contingency plans if the railroad industry did not meet the deadline.

“If you know that they aren’t going to be in compliance at the end of the year, what are you going to do?” asked Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri.

Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, said he and other panel members were frustrated by the “lack of a specific proposal concerning an extension.”

Ms. Feinberg was introduced at the hearing by Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, whom she has known since she was a child. Mr. Manchin called Ms. Feinberg “uniquely qualified to lead the agency.”

Ms. Feinberg, a former Facebook executive and White House adviser, has dealt with several high-profile rail accidents during her tenure at the railroad administration. In addition to the Amtrak wreck, a train derailment in Oxnard, Calif., killed the engineer and injured about 30 people, and an oil train derailment in West Virginia caused the evacuation of about 100 people from their homes.

During her tenure, higher domestic oil production has caused a significant increase in the amount of crude oil traveling by rail, setting off concerns about the safety of those shipments through cities and towns.

Before she became acting administrator, Ms. Feinberg’s most relevant transportation experience was the nearly 18 months she spent as chief of staff to Anthony Foxx, the transportation secretary. Mr. Foxx, whose department oversees the railroad agency, has said that Ms. Feinberg has his full confidence.

Railroad administrators without transportation experience are not unprecedented. Recent examples include Gilbert E. Carmichael, who led the agency from 1989 to 1993 and was active in Mississippi Republican politics before he became administrator. Likewise, John H. Riley, who led the Federal Railroad Administration from 1983 to 1989, worked as a Senate aide before being appointed to lead the agency by President Ronald Reagan.

During her time as acting administrator, Ms. Feinberg has issued a crude-by-rail rule that imposes significant new safety requirements and has started a partnership with Google to integrate the railroad administration’s grade crossing data into its mapping software, allowing users to receive audio and visual alerts about railroad crossings.

Safety deadline may exempt U.S. railroads from common carrier freight obligations

Repost from Reuters

Exclusive: Safety deadline may exempt U.S. railroads from freight obligations

By David Morgan, September 8, 2015
A freight locomotive rolls across an intersection in Fresno, California January 6, 2015. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith
A freight locomotive rolls across an intersection in Fresno, California January 6, 2015. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

U.S. railroads may not be obligated under federal law to carry freight including crude oil and hazardous materials from Jan. 1 if they fail to meet a year-end deadline for implementing new train safety technology, according to a top federal regulator.

In a Sept. 3 letter to the Senate Commerce Committee, U.S. Surface Transportation Board Chairman Daniel Elliott says the common carrier obligation requiring freight railroads to honor reasonable requests for service from shippers “is not absolute, and railroads can suspend service for various reasons, including safety.”

The letter, reviewed by Reuters, presents the most tangible sign yet of what could lie ahead for rail carriers and their customers, if Congress fails to extend its Dec. 31 deadline for railroads to implement positive train control, or PTC.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which has been calling on railroads to adopt PTC since the late 1960s, says the technology would prevent major rail accidents such as the May 12 Amtrak derailment that killed eight people and injured more than 200 others.

The approaching deadline has prompted at least one major railroad company to look seriously at suspending service: billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s BNSF Railway Co (BRKa.N), the No. 2 freight railroad operator and the leading carrier in the $2.8 billion U.S. crude-by-rail market.

“BNSF confirmed that it will not meet the deadline and offered the possibility that neither passenger nor freight traffic would operate on BNSF lines,” Elliott said in the letter, which was addressed to the committee’s Republican chairman, Senator John Thune of South Dakota.

In a July 24 letter provided to Reuters by BNSF, railroad president and chief executive Carl Ice informed Elliott that BNSF is analyzing the possibility of a service shutdown and actively consulting with customers.

CSX Corp (CSX.N), the No. 3 U.S. freight handler, also told the board that it would not meet the PTC deadline but did not discuss possible decisions on whether to continue service, Elliott said.

A CSX spokeswoman said the company was working diligently to implement PTC but that a “seamless, safe operation is imperative to maintain the fluidity of the national rail network.”

Railroad officials in June raised the possibility of shutting down service as a way to avoid potential legal liabilities and fines for operating outside the law.

Elliott told Thune it was unclear whether railroads would be exempt from their obligation to provide freight service for cargo, including hazardous materials, under federal rules that say service cannot be denied simply because it is inconvenient or unprofitable for the carrier.

The Surface Transportation Board, a regulatory agency charged by Congress with resolving rail disputes over rates and service, had no immediate comment, nor did the Federal Railroad Administration, the main U.S. railroad regulator.

Up to now, the board has mainly handled common carrier obligation cases involving services that have complied with federal safety rules. “A carrier-initiated curtailment of service due to a failure to comply … would present a case of first impression,” Elliott wrote. “I cannot predict the outcome of such a case.”

PTC can avoid accidents by using a complex network of sensors and automated controls to slow or stop a train under dangerous conditions.

In 2008, Congress mandated that railroads implement the technology by the end of 2015. But only a small number of U.S. passenger, commuter and freight railroads will meet the deadline, according to an Obama administration report released last month. [ID: L1N11A275]. The report named BNSF as one of only three railroads that have provided regulators with a PTC implementation plan.

Railroad officials have complained about the cost and complexity of adopting PTC and have produced freight and commuter rail estimates showing full implementation could cost the industry nearly $13 billion.

A six-year transportation bill approved by the Senate last month would allow the Obama administration to extend the deadline for up to three years.

“The administration requested authority to extend the deadline for positive train control and the Senate subsequently advanced a bipartisan proposal to create accountability and set realistic deadlines,” said Frederick Hill, Republican spokesman for the Senate Commerce Committee.

“This provision in the surface transportation bill will address the concerns summarized in Chairman Elliott’s correspondence,” he added.

But the Senate measure is not expected to be taken up by the House of Representatives when lawmakers return from their summer break this week. Republican staff with the House Transportation Committee were not available for comment.

(Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Nick Zieminski)

Railroads face big fines for failure to meet federal safety deadline

Repost from McClatchyDC

Railroads face big fines for failure to meet federal safety deadline

HIGHLIGHTS

  • Feds plan to enforce Dec. 31 deadline
  • Penalties could add up for railroads
  • Congress hasn’t provided much funding
By Curtis Tate, August 7, 2015

An Amtrak Capitol Corridor train from Sacramento, Calif., arrives at Diridon Station in San Jose on Aug. 10, 2012, alongside trains of Altamont Commuter Express. Amtrak and commuter railroads must install Positive Train Control this year under a 2008 mandate from Congress, but most will miss the deadline.

The Federal Railroad Administration plans to impose big penalties on railroads that fail to meet a year-end deadline to install a new collision avoidance system, including more than 70 percent of the nation’s commuter railroads.

Congress mandated Positive Train Control in 2008, but most of the nation’s commuter and freight railroads won’t have the system ready by Dec. 31. The technology is required for about 60,000 miles of track, including those that carry passengers or chemicals that are poisonous or toxic by inhalation.

A push in Congress to extend the deadline by three to five years has stalled, and lawmakers aren’t scheduled to return to the Capitol until next month.

Despite the commuter rail industry’s best efforts, implementing PTC nationwide by the end of this year is not possible. Michael Melaniphy, president and CEO, American Public Transportation Association

In a Friday report to lawmakers, the FRA said it planned to enforce the mandate they set in 2008. As of Jan. 1, 2016, railroads that have failed to install Positive Train Control on the required track segments face fines up to $25,000 a day for each violation.

“The potential civil penalties that FRA could assess are substantial,” the agency wrote.

Only 29 percent of the nation’s commuter railroads will meet the Dec. 31 deadline, according to the American Public Transportation Association, and the rest may need one to five more years.

“Despite the commuter rail industry’s best efforts,” said Michael Melaniphy, the association’s president and CEO, “implementing PTC nationwide by the end of this year is not possible.”

FRA has requested funding from Congress every year since 2011 to help commuter railroads install Positive Train Control, including $825 million in President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2016 budget. Lawmakers have only provided $42 million to date.

“Congress has not provided a guaranteed, reliable revenue stream for implementation on commuter railroads,” the agency wrote.

The agency has used other tools to help commuter railroads, including $650 million in grant funds, $400 million of which came from the 2009 economic stimulus.

In May, FRA issued a $967 million loan to the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the nation’s largest commuter rail agency, to install Positive Train Control on the Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road.

Melaniphy said that commuter railroads have spent $950 million to date on the system, but need nearly $3.5 billion to get the job done.

The National Transportation Safety Board has recommended the system since 1969, but Congress didn’t require it until the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008.

Twenty-five people were killed in August of that year when a Metrolink commuter train smashed head-on into a freight train near Chatsworth, Calif.

Positive Train Control could have automatically stopped the train before it ran past a red signal. Metrolink is one of the few commuter railroads that will meet the Dec. 31 deadline.

$25,000 Maximum fine, per incident per day, for missing Dec. 31 deadline

In other more recent fatal crashes, trains approached curves at two or three times the appropriate speed, and the system could automatically have slowed them down.

Four people died in December 2013 when a Metro-North commuter train jumped the tracks north of New York City. The train was traveling 82 mph at a curve restricted to 30 mph.

In May, an Amtrak Northeast Corridor train barreled into a 50 mph curve north of Philadelphia at 106 mph and derailed. Eight people were killed.

Amtrak will meet the Dec. 31 deadline for installing Positive Train Control along the Northeast Corridor, which it owns. On other routes, it will depend on freight railroads, some of which will be ready, while some won’t.

According to FRA, only freight hauler BNSF and two commuter railroads, Metrolink and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, have submitted safety plans required under the 2008 federal law.