Feds: Railroads not on track with key technology

Authorities tout ‘positive train control’ systems

PHILADELPHIA — The nation’s three busiest commuter railroads — which together serve nearly 1 million riders in the New York City area each day — continue to lag behind their smaller West Coast counterparts in installing sophisticated positive train control, or PTC, technology that’s seen as an antidote to crashes involving speeding and other human factors, federal regulators said.

The Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit and Metro-North all made scant progress on implementing GPS-based positive train control in the quarter ending Sept. 30, according to new Federal Railroad Administration data.

Over the last three months, the LIRR and Metro-North have trained more employees on the system, the data shows, but neither they nor NJ Transit installed it on any tracks.

The railroads say the federal data don’t fully reflect their progress and that they are still on track to meet a December 2018 deadline to install the technology, which is designed to automatically slow or stop trains that are going too fast.

The LIRR and MetroNorth say they’ve installed PTC equipment on more than 300 train cars and placed more than 2,000 transponders along their tracks.

Federal investigators have listed a lack of PTC as a contributing factor in at least 25 crashes over the last 20 years, including a MetroNorth wreck in New York City in 2013 that killed four people and one involving Amtrak in Philadelphia last year that killed eight people.

In both crashes, trains entered sharp curves at more than double the speed limit. Investigators are now looking at whether PTC could have prevented a fatal crash in September, in which a train plowed into a station going double the 10 mph speed limit.

The railroad industry dropped opposition to PTC after a Metrolink commuter train whose engineer was texting ran a stop signal and collided head-on with a freight train near Los Angeles in 2008, killing 25 people. Metrolink is now among the nation’s leaders in PTC implementation.

San Francisco’s Caltrain, San Diego’s Coaster and Seattle’s Sounder commuter railroads all have PTC equipment installed on their locomotives, but none of them have the system fully implemented.

SEPTA, in the Philadelphia area, operates the only northeast commuter railroad nearing full implementation.

The transit agency’s railroad division — the nation’s fifth busiest — has PTC in place on all but one stretch of track, according to agency data.

Amtrak has installed positive train control on most of the 450 miles of track it owns between Washington and Boston.

AP/FILE Federal investigators have listed a lack of technology called positive train control, demonstrated above, as a contributing factor in at least 25 crashes over the last 20 years.