The Big Slowdown

By Jake Blumgart

The passengers on Amtrak train 188 could have been spared the disaster that befell them just a year ago. The accident in lower northeast Philadelphia that killed eight people and wounded over 200 more occurred mere months before positive train control, a new technology designed to prevent such tragedies, was due to be installed.

Before the crash, train 188 was racing along at 106 miles per hour, over twice the speed limit on that curving stretch of track. The engineer, Brandon Bostian, tested negative for drugs or alcohol and records show that his cell phone was not in use. Nonetheless, he did not recognize the danger until it was too late. Bostian attempted to brake, and when it became clear that wouldn't be enough, he activated the emergency brake; but his efforts were for naught. Train 188 was simply going too fast for Bostian to prevent the derailment by the time he recognized anything was wrong.

PTC was created to prevent just this kind of disaster. This federally mandated safety system is designed to alert train engineers when their locomotives are traveling too fast for a particular stretch of track and, if the warning goes unheeded, to slow the train down without human input.

But on that section of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor, its installation had been delayed. That isn't unusual. Funds have proven in short supply and this critically important, and immensely complex, safety system has yet to reach the great majority of the nation's regional rail systems.

The glare of media attention after the derailment highlighted the bitter struggle of Amtrak and local agencies that felt they were being asked to make an impossible choice between expending their shrinking resources on maintaining existing operations and implementing a new safety technology. In the end they finally won a modicum of funding from a reluctant Congress, in the wake of the awful tragedy that befell Bostian and train 188. Still, there are not nearly enough funds available to ensure the rapid implementation of PTC.

Congress ordered positive train control to be implemented across all of America's major rail lines almost eight years ago — covering over 70,000 miles of track — after a 2008 crash on the Southern California Regional Rail Authority's (Metrolink) Ventura County Line. In that disaster, 25 people were killed when a commuter train collided with an oncoming freight train. (The driver had been texting and missed a red signal light.)

Despite the grim scale of that accident, the federal mandate for PTC that followed provided no funding for actually implementing the complicated safety machinery by the established 2015 deadline. Little progress had been made by 2013, when a deadly derailment on New York's Metro-North commuter line killed four people. PTC could have prevented that tragedy as well.

"I can state unequivocally that we need Positive Train Control technology on our nation's railroads," wrote Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman in an op-ed in USA Today following the Metro-North crash. "PTC is the most important rail safety advancement of our time. ... However, without additional resources and an increased level of commitment, the federal deadline may not be met."

Despite his warning, and persistent pressure from the Federal Railroad Administration, by the time train 188 came off the rails a year and a half later, few railroad companies looked as though they would be able to meet the end of 2015 deadline.

Expect delays

When Congress first mandated widespread PTC implementation in 2008, a multiyear phase-in was a necessity on the grounds of sheer complexity alone. PTC is essentially an enhancement on an older system of train safety called automatic train control, a long established tool common (even antiquated) elsewhere in the world. But even this older system is still lacking in some corners of the U.S.

ATC establishes communication between the train and the signal system that lets engineers know when to stop, go slow, or forge quickly ahead. Under ATC, if the vehicle passes an established signal point at a speed faster than the limit, alarms will sound in the cab. If the driver does not respond quickly enough, the ATC system will apply the emergency brake on its own.

PTC essentially marries this long-standing system with contemporary GPS technology to allow the warning system to kick in if the driver is going too fast at any point along the track, not just where the signal wires are standing sentinel. (Amtrak 188's fate is a good example of the limits of ATC: The older system was in place along that stretch of track but the curve where the train derailed fell in a blind spot.) It also allows for subtler regulations of train speed and can be calibrated differently in case of, say, bad weather or nearby track work.

Although the ATC system is standard across Amtrak, some commuter rail systems only had it installed along select routes — thus driving the costs of the PTC mandate even higher.

PTC would have been a difficult system to implement in the best of times. The complex interplay of different rail lines — many commuter trains frequently use rails owned by Amtrak and freight companies — makes building a uniform system complicated.

To make things more arduous, there aren't many contractors with experience installing systems akin to PTC. When Congress required all commuter systems, freight carriers, and Amtrak to adopt the system at the same time, the few contractors available to do the job quickly found their skills in high demand.

"PTC is not an off-the-shelf item. It's a new technology that requires extensive developing and testing," says Nancy Snyder, spokeswoman for NJ Transit, which estimates that it will be able to achieve full PTC coverage by 2018 at a cost of $225 million. "A very limited number of firms are able to provide such a system and equipment. In addition to that, there's also inoperability issues between the railroads and their individual PTC systems, especially with us, where we share rail with freight and Amtrak."

Acquiring the radio bandwidth that the system needs to function proved an even greater challenge. Railroads need frequencies of 220 megahertz to implement this new safety system, and once it became widely known that they were legally mandated to complete its installation by 2015, prices shot up. "They [the owners] were asking for some very big, ridiculously high numbers for their spectrum," remembers Michael Monastero, SEPTA's Chief Engineering Officer of Communication and Signals.

An unfunded mandate

The railroad companies and transit agencies were asked to juggle all these considerations at the worst possible moment. George W. Bush signed the Rail Safety Improvement Act into law barely a month after Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy.

The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression upended the always fragile fiscal calculations of America's perpetually underfunded transit systems. Congress allotted no funds to offset the cost of PTC implementation, despite a staggering projected price tag. In 2013, the Federal Railroad Administration estimated that the initial costs for installing PTC would be $875 million, while over the next 20 years costs could run as high as $13.2 billion.

"FRA has long stated that a lack of public sector funding may result in unwanted delays in fully implementing PTC, especially on commuter railroads," the agency wrote in an August 2015 progress report on the 2008 law's mandate. "FRA has requested funding for PTC development and implementation in every budget request dating back to Fiscal Year (FY) 2011. Congress has not provided a guaranteed, reliable revenue stream for implementation on commuter railroads."

In this context, the transit agencies were presented with the choice of attempting to add one more ball to their juggler's rotation or concentrate on maintaining their perilously situated systems and hope for a last-minute intervention that would forestall massive fines or other punishments. (The 2008 law wasn't clear about the repercussions of a blown deadline.)

"When the law passed in 2008, SEPTA had historically low capital funds," says Jeffrey D. Knueppel, general manager of the Philly transit agency. "We were in really bad shape. But because this was the law, SEPTA put all our eggs in one basket and allocated the funds to make PTC happen. We deferred a lot of projects. We spent a lot of our available money on PTC and had not been able to keep up with other safety concerns. If Act 89 [a near-miraculous state funding bill] hadn't come along we would have had to start shrinking our rail network."

PTC has cost SEPTA well over $300 million, despite a series of windfalls that include a long-standing relationship with a contractor capable of installing PTC, limited rail shared with freight companies, and a lucky break on purchasing cheap bandwidth.

But SEPTA was only spared from having to trim its regional rail network by a last-minute transportation funding bill, Act 89, that barely passed the Republican-dominated state legislature in 2013. (Their capital budget has almost doubled since the 2014 fiscal year, although it is still under $600 million, less than half that of NJTransit, their closest neighbor.) No other state received a windfall of that kind. Nearly everywhere else funding has been falling instead, both from federal and state sources.

Most other transit agencies made the opposite choice and seemed in no rush to meet the 2015 deadline established in 2008. They begged a combination of technical difficulties and insuperable funding barriers. They also assumed that Congress would, eventually, offer mercy to an industry that maintains a lobbying operation that has spent over $316 million since 2008, according to the Washington Post.

Ironically, before the Philadelphia crash, Amtrak and SEPTA were two of the only three rail lines that were prepared to meet the deadline. (The agency whose disaster precipitated the 2008 legislation, California's Metrolink, was the third.) On the night of the May 2015 tragedy, PTC already covered much of Amtrak's Northeastern corridor route, including the southward track that paralleled the track where train 188 met its fate.

If the Metrolink crash spurred PTC legislation in 2008, however, the legislation that followed the Amtrak accident in Philadelphia instead extended the deadline. The nation's transit authorities now have until 2018, perhaps even 2020, to implement the required changes.

The extension granted by Congress was followed by a dribble of funding, although nothing close to meeting the need. The $305 billion transportation bill, passed in late 2015 and meant to last five years (read the full story on the FAST bill on page 16), put $199 million toward PTC on commuter rail systems. A further $25 million was provided in the year-end omnibus spending bill, although technically it can be used for any kind of safety measures.

Other than the three companies mentioned above, few other agencies expect their updates to be complete much before the new deadline. Although NJTransit officials initially said that the PTC extension rollout could be completed by the end of 2016, the agency's Nancy Snyder now says 2018 (the year of the new deadline) is the soonest the agency will be able to complete its task. Chicago's Metra, which threatened to shut down if the deadline was not extended, estimates that the end of 2019 is the most realistic date for full implementation.

"We are encouraged that many railroads have submitted plans to meet — some even to beat — 2018," wrote Sarah E. Feinberg, administrator of the Federal Rail Administration, in an email message. "But we remain concerned that several other freight and passenger railroads are aiming for 2020. The Federal Railroad Administration will continue to do everything it can to help railroads install and activate this lifesaving technology as quickly and safely as possible."

For SEPTA the extension is bittersweet. An extra cushion is certainly useful, as the agency only expected to begin testing on one of its 13 lines in late winter. But SEPTA officials seem frustrated that they have advanced beyond the point where they can realistically make use of the nascent streams of federal support.

Although they, along with Amtrak and Metrolink, were one of the few agencies with the potential to meet the original deadline, they cannot take advantage of the newly allocated funds because they have already spent many tens of millions of dollars in pursuit of PTC. They are effectively missing out on financial incentives because they'd worked rigorously to meet the dictates of the old law.

"They have made some funds available, but obviously for SEPTA we are too far along," says Knueppel. He demurred when asked whether he thinks that it's fair that SEPTA can't seek recompense from the newly available aid despite being so close to meeting the old deadline. "I won't comment on that." After a bit more prompting, he simply replied, "I think you know what we would be upset about."

Despite missing out on the relief funds, riders passing through Philadelphia on either SEPTA or Amtrak will soon be able to rest easy in the knowledge that the kind of accident that befell train 188 won't be repeated in the City of Brotherly Love. It remains unclear when the rest of America's rail riders will join them in that assurance.

Jake Blumgart is a reporter and editor based in Philadelphia.