PTC, hours-of-service concerns voiced at House ‘Rail Safety Act’ hearing
The U.S. rail industry’s record safety achievements are due in large part to the resources freight railroads have committed to improving safety during the past 30 years, and safety will not be bolstered if resources are directed to positive train control (PTC) that would have had a more pronounced impact if spent elsewhere, Association of American Railroads (AAR) officials told House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee members during a hearing yesterday on the status of the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008.
Railroads have made large investments in safety-enhancing infrastructure, equipment and technology, as well as employee training and cooperative programs with other safety stakeholder groups, such as labor unions, shippers and federal regulators, said Norfolk Southern Corp. Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Mark Manion, who testified on behalf of the AAR.
It is “short sighted” to place an enormous emphasis on one technology — PTC — when less costly, more effective alternatives exist for reducing the risk of accidents, he said.
There are concerns that the Federal Railroad Administration’s (FRA) final PTC rule exceeded the scope of its mandate, said Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), who chairs the House committee’s Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee, adding that “regulatory overreach” could threaten the rail industry and economy for “very little safety benefit.”
Shuster also questioned the FRA order that railroads install PTC
Interesting, and predictable, responses after listening to Steve Ditmeyer last week at a Sandhouse Gang meeting at Northwestern University. The railroads seemingly fought to keep PTC simple; and now turn around and complain that it is an excessive financial burden with a new Congress.
Steve led the development of the satellite-based Advanced Railroad Electronics System (ARES) for Burlington Northern for positive train control and live-time status monitoring. ARES was far more encompassing with sizable business benefits than is being incorporated in the mandated bare-bones signal safety overlay described as Positive Train Control.
For instance:
Train weight, performance feedbak, and dynamic braking are not included in the mandated PTC algorithm; so worst-case braking is assumed, impacting line capacity.
Locomotive malfunctions cannot be diagnosed before the unit arrives at a terminal to save time for maintenance; nor can simple fixes be made in route.
The real-time location of the train is unknown to assist dispatching and improve efficiency.
Digital text messages would be targeted and clearer, and would result in less voice radio clutter in issuing and acknowledging movement authority.
Dumb question. If the White Pass & Youkon (WP&Y) starts their proposed freight service will that move them out of tourist RR and then they would need PTC to the Canadian border??
I’m not familiar with WP&Y’s proposed freight service. However, the existence of the freight service shouldn’t change the nature of their passenger service. In other words, if WP&Y’s passenger service didn’t require PTC to be installed on their lines before the “proposed freight service”, then it shouldn’t require it with the proposed freight service. On the other hand, the “proposed freight service”, depending what it is, may itself required PTC (if, for example, it includes TIH traffiic).
The paper “Network-Centric Railway Operations Utilizing Intelligent Railway Systems” proposes a wide array of real time data collection/processing components for a system that would provide railroad managers everything they would ever need to know to run the most efficient railroad possible. While describin
I see no point in developing variable block technology, if the point of it the effort is to increase capacity of a main line. The reason is that variable blocks don’t increase train capacity of a main line.
The WP&YR is statutorily exempt from a requirement to install PTC because it is not a Class 1 railroad nor a railroad regularly engaged in the movement of intercity or commuter passengers.
Both PTC and the NS and GE systems are based on the same satellite technology. Ditmeyer reasoned that these and other functions should be developed in coordination with one another to provide commonality while ensuring security of business information.
Dynamic braking is not included because it’s not practical to measure the effectiveness of dynamic braking in a predictive fashion. It would require making locomotive power circuits “safety critical.” That is neither easy nor inexpensive. It would at a minimum require redundant circuits, grids, and traction motors. Performance feedback as a modification to the braking algorithm is also predictive. Now we would be asking to make climate and rail conditions “safety critical” too.
Railroads already have those features implemented through other systems. Loading these systems onto a PTC system is asking to make the PTC system even more complicated. Loading non-safety critical systems onto a safety critical system is likely to make the safety-critical system less reliable and less safe.
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The real-time location of the train is unknown to assist di
Not really. The locomotive monitoring systems use GPS to determine location (this system only needs an approximate location, and GPS is cheap and easy). They use cellular technology to transmit and receive data. It’s encrypted. They also have access to WiFi hotspots in locomotive terminals and use satellite telephone technology when cellular is out of range. PTC uses GPS to determine location, in part, along with other systems. Similarly, PTC uses satellite telephone technology to back up its primary VHF backbone.
You could piggyback PTC and locomotive health onto the same GPS antenna and save about $10 per locomotive. Piggybacking the locomotive health function onto the PTC data backbone will kill even more bandwidth that it doesn’t have.
Suporting an assertion that a variable block feature improves capacity with a footnote, Ditmeyer cites the 2004 Zeta-Tech Associates report to the FRA quantifying PTC benefits.
“They also determined that an investment in PTC on the US railroad network would result in the avoidance of a large investment railroads would otherwise have to make to increase capacity on an estimated 8,300 route miles of railroad (about 8% of the network) that are currently operating at or above design capacity. This would be worth $1.1 billion in annualized costs avoided.”
I assume that the Wyman report to the AAR and other subsequent studies have found the claim for improved capacity to be without merit and so I accept your view. If I understand it correctly, the variable block feature would be an add on to the basic PTC system with perhaps a considerable cost to develope and deploy. Not that I am that smart, but absent a capacity improvement, I can’t think of any benefit to the feature that would produce any good return on the investment.
Given that the railroads will only recover about 1/15th of the cost of PTC, a safety system demanded by the public, perhaps the public should pay for the benefit. Maybe they will. Isn’t the cost for an investment that doesn’t produce additional revenue or
The overriding determinate of line capacity is not block sizes on Main tracks…it is terminal capacity at the ends of the Main tracks. Hustling trains across 200 miles or more of Main track does nothing for capacity of the line if the train can’t be yarded at it destination.
During the 80’s and early 90’s the carriers put much effort into ‘rationalizing’ their physical plant and many terminals were reduced in size to accommodate the traffic patterns that existed at the time. Increasing terminal capacity requires investment capital…capital that may not be available being allocated to PTC.
That sounds like a horrendously bad idea to me. There would be little problem if the GPS antenna was being used as a receive only antenna for other modes.
I don’t know if the GPS antenna for the locomotive health function is active or passive. As for PTC, it’s only used for GPS location. It’s not used for peer-to-peer communication with wayside interface units, or for communication with the VHF backbone. For that a separate VHF antenna is used.
RWM: Many different commpany’s over the road tractor trailers have a 2 way antenna usually mounted on the top left rear of the tractor. JB Hunt has a r/t in the truck and each time the tractor is started and every 30 minutes later it transmitts its position to a satellite that relays the transmission to a locating computer. The antenna is also a GPS receiver and message receiver. A message can be sent to a specific tractor at any time and a message waiting annunciator will alert driver that he/she has a message.
