Fred is “right on” in the April issue with his anaysis of positive train control.
This mandate by Congress is just another (number ???) of their knee jerk actions. Did they also pass this one and then find out what’s in it.
I have a Pennslyvania Railroad promo fim shot in the early 50’s showcasing their version of Positive Train Control and how well it worked. Anyone out there know what happened to it in the long run? Was it a flop? Seems to me this technology’s been around for a while, just no-ones bothered to utilize it.
The portion of the article I found disturbing was the requirement each railroad submit its “PTC Safety Plan” to the FRA for approval. It seemed to me that requirement assumes there exists within the FRA some body of PTC experts whose wisdom exceeds that of the industry. As Fred points out, the industry and its suppliers are struggling through a learn as you go experience, and the thought that somehow the FRA has already has the answers is bureaucratic nonsense.
I think what the PRR used was not PTC (Positive Train Control) but ATS (Automatic Train Stop), although I might have the acronyms wrong. The difference is that ATS is reactive… A train passes a red signal and then the brakes apply automatically. PTC is supposed to be proactive… the system will sense that a train approaching a red signal is not slowing, so the system will intervene to stop the train before it passes the signal.
While that may seem to be a minor difference it can be tragic. Both the collisions at Chatsworth and the wreck of Amtrak’s Colonial at Gunpow interlocking occurred only seconds after the rule violation actually occurred. At Gunpow the time between Ricky Gates’ engines sliding through the switch and out onto the main track and the collision when the Colonial hit them was just 7 seconds.
PTC might be proactive, but Congress is defiantly reactive. My old newsman senses tell me that if the Chatsworth wreck had occurred in , rather than the media center of the world it would have quickly become a trivia question, except to those involved. Reminds me of the movie “Blazing Saddles” when the Governor tells his Cabinet: “I better get a lot more harrumphs out of you guys!”
Chatsworth was just the straw that broke the Camel’s back, enough people were killed and injured seriously that political pressure forced Congress to act. BN had been experimenting with the idea for about 25 years as an alternative to installing CTC in the many areas of Dark Territory that exist on the former BN part of BNSF. The biggest impetus to that experiment was a head-on collision between two freight trains in Dark Territory. This was in the early TWC days, one of the trains misunderstood their track warrant, they read it back to the DS and in his mind he heard it as he had read it, not as it was repeated back to him. No one realized anything was wrong until the railroad was called by a local County Sheriff’s dept. after one of their deputies went to investigate a plume of smoke he saw on the horizon. All the crewman were killed on both trains, though at least two survived the crash, but died before rescuers even knew about the accident. During the reconstruction it was determined that the accident happened nearly two hours before the deputy reached the scene. That accident was the impetus for BN to begin the collaboration with Rockwell-Collins into a system known as ARES which is the direct predecessor of today’s PTC system. The big problem with ARES was that the Electronics of the day were not rugged enough for on-train use, though there have been other improvements too.
Not being confrontational here, but was the political pressure from this wreck any stronger than the political pressure to balance the federal budget and reduce the national debt? It is easy to dictate an unfunded mandate to corporate America or even lower forms of government when there is no skin off ones(politicians) back.
The unusual speed of action by a routinely sloth paced federal government is what is amazing. Not to mention how much that one text message has ended up costing our nations railroads.
Jay
Why must we start with Positive Train Control instead of Positive Truck Control or Positive Plane Control? Instead of playing ball with the government on this absurdity, the railroads should be fighting it with all their might.
They have made the same mistake as the utilities did when the utilities – to “get along” – admitted the bogus argument against carbon dioxide. No good comes from conceding arguments made from emotion and – sometimes – sinister political purposes.
I don’t think the railroads “conceded” anything. However, they did read the handwriting on the wall after Chatsworth. The really sad part is that Congress was bamboozled big time by people who should have known better (like NTSB) into believing that PTC was a fully developed system which the railroads were simply not wiling to deploy, so all that was necessary was a Congressional mandate. We can thank NTSB for feeding Congress this crock of you-know -what. The fact is that PTC systems (particularly systems with the functionalities mandated by Congress) were only in their infancy and weren’t even close to being ready for widescale deployment. To say that NTSB misled Congress would be a considerable understatement.
The speed of action in this matter is directly linked to how much money it is going to cost the Federal Budget…$0 and how much it is going to cost other than the Federal Budget…$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
I have personally talked to the guys who are BUILDING the PTC technology, and they said it is no where even close to being ready to test yet.
The following likely won’t be popular with the present audience, but consider it anyway:
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Without a doubt, Congress is reactive;
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What Congress reacted to was its probable perception of a mis-representation by the US railroad industry - both freight and passenger, and including the FRA - of how ‘safe’ the railroad system was;
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Specifically, within the span of about 3 years, there were 2 pretty horrible disasters of the “This should never have happened !” kind - Graniteville, SC chlorine release on NS, and Metrolink-UP collision at Chatsworth;
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So Congress - viewing those representations as now being unreliable, and confronted by repetitive actual incidents that spoke far louder than those now-hollow promises, esp. when the flames were fanned by the media - essentially said, “Since you railroads now quite obviously haven’t gotten your safety act together yet - even though we’ve left you to do so by yourselves - we’re now going to step in and make you do that where we think it’s necessary, and on our time frame, too”.
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Yes, this punished the innocent as well as the guilty - what else is new ? Very much like parents dealing with kids - “You’ve now demonstrated that you can’t be trusted, so now I have to impose the rules”.
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As jeaton’s ‘signature’ line quotes the old Pogo comic strip - “We have met the enemy, and he is us”. Said another way, if the rail industry wants to see who is responsible, “Look in the mirror”. Who else has had the need and self-interest to develop and implement such a system, but didn’t ?
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Actually, PTC wasn’t even needed to prevent or mitigate Chatsworth - one of the old Automatic Train Stop w/ cab signal systems as on the PRR would have dumped the air as soon as the MetroLink engineer went past that red signal. The MetroLink train might
Have you all already seen the breaking news article out of Washington about the Obama administration agreeing to “scale back” the PTC mandate. The print edition of this morning’s (March 5-6) Wall Street Journal (page B3) has a pretty good article on this matter. Perhaps one of you can point to the URL of this article from the WSJ On-line Edition.
Probably relates to Senate Bill S.103 introduced by Senator Hutchison from Texas to adjust the route mileage due to the changing routing of TIH shipments which will reduce the number of miles needing PTC. CP was looking for an exemption for the original DM&E mainline since the lines handled less than 1% more carloads than the minimum threshold. The former IC&E lines are well above the minimums.
25 people died at Chatsworth which is very sad. But 30,000 die each year on
this auto-centric nation’s highways and NOBODY gives a DAMN about that!
Which is down from about 45K in the middle 60’s.
There is a mindset out there, and I will let readers supply their own political label, that thinks all the exigencies and inequalities can be regulated out of life and everyone can live forever if they jog, eat lettuce and don’t have to breathe secondhand smoke. This mindset has a huge presence in Washington, D.C.
PTC would dumb down the engineer’s job until it probably wouldn’t matter if he was high or texting. But barges still run into bridges in the path of passenger trains, and trains still jump the tracks for one reason or another (as in another chemical accident, in Minot, N.D., a few years ago). So you can eliminate, at obscene expense to railroads and society, one kind of accident while still being vulnerable to all the others.
Safer if everybody just stayed in bed?
There, Henry6, is the prescription for a Third World future for the United States – not our failure to embrace HSR or PTC.
Sorry, everybody. In the post above, I apparently was responding to posts Henry made on another thread, “How much more business can railroads handle?”