Canadian railway industry awaiting ‘right solution’

Enhanced train control systems are costly, unproven technology, industry says

Canada’s railway industry is waiting for the development of better technology before installing devices in this country that could slow trains to prevent accidents like the recent Amtrak derailment that killed three people and injured dozens.

Gerald Gauthier, acting president of the Railway Association of Canada, says the enhanced train control systems that must be installed by railways operating in the United States next year are costly, unproven technology.

“We want this to happen but we have to make sure that we have a technology that won’t fail us and before putting on something that would fail, we want to take our time and come up with the right solution,” he said in an interview.

Canada has been studying ways to improve safety since a 2012 incident in Burlington caused a Via passenger train to derail. That derailment near the Aldershot station caused three deaths and dozens of injuries.

The industry has been working with Transport Canada and participated in a working group that concluded the best option would be a targeted, risk-based approach that varies according to train corridors.

“It was determined the U.S. approach taken in the legislated requirement for full-scale widespread positive train control is not the right fit for Canada,” said a department spokesperson.

Transport Canada said the outcome of a study of enhanced train control systems being conducted by the Canadian Rail Research Laboratory of the University of Alberta will be published in the new year.

The Transportation Safety Board recommended after the 2012 derailment that major Canadian passenger and freight railways be required to implement “physical fail-safe train controls.”

These could include warning lights for conductors or systems that could automatically bring a train to a halt.

The U.S. mandated in 2008 that Class 1 freight railways and passenger trains develop and install what it called positive train control systems by the end of 2015. Congress passed a three-year extension after railways said they couldn’t meet the deadline.

The U.S. system is expected to cost more than US$14 billion to install, and hundreds of millions more annually to operate.

Canadian Pacific Railway president Keith Creel wrote in 2015 to U.S. Sen. John Thune appealing for more time to install the system.

“Development of the new technology, particularly mission-critical software, has proven extremely challenging and taken longer than estimated,” he wrote.

Implementing similar technologies in Canada would run into many of the same issues along with challenges of track in remote locations and extreme weather conditions, said the 2016 working group report.

Via Rail said it’s developing a system to prevent missed and misread signals and prevent operator error.