Lawmakers: Penalize railroads that don’t hit safety deadline

The mother of a woman killed when a speeding Amtrak train hurtled from the tracks in May 2015 told a Senate committee on Thursday that she is seething over the prospect of more delays in installing speed controls that could have prevented that wreck and dozens of others.

Technology executive Rachel Jacobs was among eight passengers killed when the Washington-to-New York train crashed in Philadelphia. Now, almost three years later, a government study has found that most U.S. passenger railroads are still woefully behind and unlikely to meet a Dec. 31 deadline to switch on the technology known as positive train control, or PTC.

“More trains have derailed, other passengers have died, and scores of others have been injured,” Rachel’s mother, Gilda Jacobs, wrote in a letter read into the record. “My anger is seething.”

The Government Accountability Office study released Wednesday found that as many as two-thirds of the nation’s 29 commuter railroads weren’t on track to meet the deadline and that some of them were unlikely to make enough progress to merit a two-year extension.

The agency that operates two of the largest commuter railroads, the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North in New York City’s suburbs, said it’s on an “extraordinarily aggressive and tight schedule” to meet the deadline.

So far, regulators said, no railroad has requested an extension.

PTC is designed to slow or stop trains that are going too fast, take control when an engineer is distracted or incapacitated and prevent collisions with other trains.