Long-overdue rail upgrades could prevent the next big train catastrophe. So why are the railroads so reluctant to make them?
Posted 01.17.2013 at 10:00 am
21 Comments
The Aftermath: The chlorine released in the Graniteville crash killed nine people, sickened 72, and demonstrated the lethal potential of human error in the rail system. AP Photo/EPA
Forty years ago, the National Transportation Safety Board began urging railroads to design a way for a train to stop itself if the engineer “loses situational awareness”—that is, has a heart attack, falls asleep, gets distracted, or makes an all-too-human mistake. It wasn’t like NTSB was asking railroads to find a cure for cancer. As early as the 1920s, the Santa Fe rail line between Kinsley and Dodge City, Kansas, used a rudimentary system to stop a train if it passed a red signal. In the mid-1980s, in the Minnesota iron range, Burlington Northern successfully operated the first GPS-based system to stop a train automatically if the engineer made a mistake; it dropped it within the decade, to save money.
Railroaders call such technology—systems that slow or stop a train without human intervention when the engineer makes a dangerous mistake—positive train control (PTC). The modern version requires the train to be “aware” both of what it is doing and what is happening on the tracks ahead, using a combination of data radios, GPS, and cellular networks. If a discrepancy arises—a switch is open that shouldn’t be or the locomotive is passing a red signal—and the engineer doesn’t respond, the system takes control of the train, applying the air-brakes and shutting down the locomotive.
In 1990, the NTSB put positive train control on its list of most-wanted transportation-safety improvements. The NTSB, though, has no regulatory authority, so the five U.S. Class I freight railroads—Burlington-Northern Santa Fe, CSX, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, and Kansas City Southern, all of which have annual operating revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars—simply ignored the agency. Only Amtrak responded, installing a type of positive train control on its Northeast Corridor trains in 2000 and a different version on some of its trains in the Midwest a year later. The Federal Railroad Administration, the railroads’ regulator, had the power to make the Class I’s fall in line behind Amtrak, but instead, the agency agreed with the Class I’s: Positive train control was too expensive.
In 2007, Congress finally got involved, passing a law mandating positive train control, but President George W. Bush refused to sign it. Then came Chatsworth.
As a passenger-rail engineer, Robert Sanchez was, quite literally, a train wreck waiting to happen. Clinically obese, with high blood pressure, enlarged heart valves, diabetes, and HIV, he may also have had sleep apnea, which can leave sufferers perpetually sleep-deprived. To make matters worse, his work schedule at Metrolink, the commuter rail service for the Los Angeles basin, seemed designed to leave a man exhausted. Sanchez started at six in the morning, drove trains until 9:30 in the morning, then started again at two in the afternoon and worked until nine at night—a 15-hour split shift.
Yet the issue on September 12, 2008, was neither his health nor his exhaustion. As he drove his three-car train loaded with passengers west from Chatsworth, Sanchez was busy swapping text messages with a teenage train buff about the supercool world of locomotives—a huge violation of company policy. Four days before, he’d had this text exchange with the teenager, whom the NTSB calls “Person A”:
Sanchez: Yea....but I’m REALLY looking forward to getting you in the cab and showing you how to run a locomotive.
Person A: Omg dude me too. Running a locomotive. Having all of that in the palms of my hands. Its a great feeling. And ill do it so good from all my practice on the simulator.
Sanchez: I’m gonna do all the radio talkin’...ur gonna run the locomotive & I’m gonna tell u how to do it.
Later texts suggest that Sanchez had indeed illegally let the teenager operate the train—two days before the accident—with passengers aboard.
On the afternoon of September 12, in the last 69 minutes of his life, Sanchez exchanged 35 text messages with the teenager. Focused on his smartphone, he missed a red signal that should have held him back from a single track shared by freight lines. At 4:22 p.m., the engineer of a westbound Union Pacific train looked up and saw Sanchez’s train coming at him at a combined speed of 80 miles an hour. The engineer hit his air brakes. Sanchez, texting until 22 seconds before impact, never touched his.
The collision drove Sanchez’s locomotive 52 feet into the first passenger rail car, killing Sanchez and all 22 people in the car. Two more passengers also died; 101 were injured. On the freight train, the engineer, conductor, and brakeman somehow all survived.
Television crews arrived fast, and the Chatsworth crash became, for the issue of rail safety, what 9/11 was to aviation security. It escaped nobody’s attention that had positive train control been in place at Chatsworth, Sanchez never would have reached the freight track; the system would have stopped his train at the red signal. Congress hastily revived the 2007 mandate and folded it into the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008, which flew through Congress in just 34 days. The president signed it late at night with no ceremony. The nation’s railroads were given until 2015 to install positive train control on the 70,000 miles of track on which passengers or toxic-by-inhalation chemicals moved. In the emotional aftermath of Chatsworth, neither the railroads nor the Federal Railroad Administration objected.
That came later.
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Great article. Thank you.
'I think I can' not!
'I think I can' not!
I not.
It's amazing that there are any accidents these days with computers and monitors and central facilities. Just a really stupid industry if they have a single accident which there is no need for that if everything automated and tied in to a central core. Stupid people living in the 1900's still.
Air conditioned sheds? Sounds like an Electrical engineer's solution. Surely there is a passive solution that's more reliable and efficient than a window unit.
$10 billion + $850 million a year to maybe prevent 7 deaths and 22 injuries a year sounds like a system designed by a Congressional committee. How much would it have cost to install an image sensor and loud alarm that blares "YOU MISSED A RED LIGHT!" in each engine instead of the uber-complicated positive train control? The safest transportation system in the world, commercial aviation, doesn't have a positive control system. Why couldn't a similar system of transponders installed on trains suffice?
@laurenra7
I believe because trains change length. Car's arent even the same length, so 2 trains 20 cars long won't be a consistant length. So if it transpsonder picked up a train a mile away how does it know how much time it has to stop? I've thought about it before because we have trains that tend to stop in the middle of town and depending on how long they are they will block intersections. The trains don't care, they just stop at the red light. The fun part is getting the front to know where the back is. Does every car need a sensor? Seems expensive. Designate an oversized standard for car size? (cars average 50 ft, so use 65ft x 20 cars = train length) Not very exact, but cheap and relies on correct information. Have a sensor beside the track to ping the front/back of a train and keep that info in the "train cloud?" Maybe, since they are investing so much in these light posts they could probably do double duty.
What is needed are smart robotic trains. A new global re-design that will automate all these error prone jobs.
Look what we're doing with the self-driving car and the train is already self-driving!
johnt007871, it was purely speculative, but what I was thinking about was a relatively inexpensive image sensor mounted at the front of the train (sometimes the engine is at the back), designed to watch for train signal lights that are red. It would measure speed, calculate for estimated mass (or number of train cars) and sound a loud alarm if the train is approaching a red light too fast to stop. It won't prevent all possible rail accidents, but it would minimize the risk of some. The point being that railroad travel in the U.S. is already remarkably safe and these complicated and expensive positive train control systems are unwarranted, given that not even the incredibly safe commercial aviation industry has anything like it.
As an engineer with 27years experience there is a lot in this article that has been addressed like cell phones are not allowed on your person at all.and the hours of service has been changed to prevent over work and sleep deprivation. On the northeast corridor we have cab signals that if you ran a signal the train would stop automatically so things are not as bad as they make it out to be.now that being said there is no excuse for crews not doing there job to the best of their ability like leavening switches open .that was a crew and dispature failure ,
If the railroads had applied targeted implementation, they would be facing much less expensive options. One would be commuter rail were fatalities are most probable. Putting laser scanning devises and cameras with train, car, and pedestrian recognition software, on commuter trains first. This is already done in self driving cars. Collision avoidance is in their future anyway, swallow a little pride call the car companies, or create a DARPA like x-prize for grad student to fix this for them. They could just throw money away until they implement the most antiquated solution. Only to have it replaced several times. They should also consider the rail as a possible network cable sending messages to sound boxes that tap out messages to other trains that pick them up by lasers reflecting on the rail. The rail is everyplace and can even communicate with a train in a tunnel. Either way we will do this again until we get it right, or we could plan how to do it cost effectively.
gimowitz, please re-read the article. The issue raised by the article is that the MAJORITY of the nations rail system is NOT effectively, adequately and accurately monitored.
Any system can be "computer-monitored" using one sensor. The question is then the value of the monitoring. Is one sensor enough? If not, then how many and where are they needed? Systems are rarely static. Most expand. Does the monitoring expand as well?
Remarkably, the writer of this column either failed to locate, or located but chose not to use, this significant report of the Federal Railroad Administration:
“Report to Congress: Positive Train Control Implementation Status, Issues, and Impacts”
August 2012
Notably, from the Executive Summary:
“…this effort is hampered by the novel nature of the issues. PTC implementation, on the scale required by the RSIA, has never been attempted anywhere in the world.”
and
“However, since FRA approved the PTCIPs, both freight and passenger railroads have encountered significant technical and programmatic issues that make accomplishment of these plans questionable. Given the current state of development and availability of the required hardware and software, along with deployment considerations, most railroads will likely not be able to complete full RSIA-required implementation of PTC by December 31, 2015. Partial deployment of PTC can likely be achieved; however, the extent of which is dependent upon successful resolution of known technical and programmatic issues and any new emergent issues.”
Read the entire report here:
www.fra.dot.gov/eLib/Details/L03718
Further from the Executive Summary:
“Although the initial PTC Implementation Plans (PTCIP) submitted by the applicable
railroads to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) for approval stated they would
complete implementation by the 2015 deadline, all of the plans were based on the assumption that there would be no technical or programmatic issues in the design, development, integration, deployment, and testing of the PTC systems they adopted. However, since FRA approved the PTCIPs, both freight and passenger railroads have encountered significant technical and programmatic issues that make accomplishment of these plans questionable. Given the current state of development and availability of the required hardware and software, along with deployment considerations, most railroads will likely not be able to complete full RSIA-required implementation of PTC by December 31, 2015. Partial deployment of PTC can likely be achieved; however, the extent of which is dependent upon successful resolution of known technical and programmatic issues and any new emergent issues.
“The technical obstacles that have been identified to date fall into seven different categories:
• Communications Spectrum Availability
• Radio Availability
• Design Specification Availability
• Back Office Server and Dispatch System Availability
• Track Database Verification
• Installation Engineering
• Reliability and Availability
“The programmatic obstacles fall into two categories:
• Budgeting and Contracting
• Stakeholder Availability
“To date, railroads have raised and expended more than $1.5 billion of private capital to try and resolve these issues. The Federal Government has distributed $50 million through the Railroad Safety Technology Grant Program. Solutions to these issues have either not been identified or cannot be implemented by the current December 31, 2015, deadline.”
Read the entire report and weep. The complexity of this endeavor, with the incumbent “vital” (essentially absolutely failsafe) technological requirements if even the marginal economic benefits are to be realized, virtually assures the failure of the project.
If the (worthy) objective of saving lives were to be optimized by Congressional diktat to expend $15 billion on railroad infrastructure, then surely PTC would rank well below isolation of railroad right-of-way to avoid collisions of trains with trespassers and motor vehicles.
I really think they should have automated trains
@Railronin; Out west it's different. We have some seriously remote places out here that crews have to get to in order to have a safe place to change out, and it happens sometimes that they just cannot get there. Road conditions happen.
Robotics? Automated Train driving systems?
ATP (Automatic Train Protection) and CBI (Computer Based Interlocking) systems have been around for quite a long time. They are very safe and avoid 98% of accidents like this, correcting driver's mistakes and bringing trains into safe conditions.
Why aren't these systems implemented in Railways yet?
Bombardier signaling solutions and Siemens' are used world wide
Late last year in Michigan a PTC precursor system failed to detect an open switch, a la Graniteville, and allowed an Amtrak train to enter at 60 mph causing a derailment and injuries.
This will not be the panacea it is proclaimed to be. First the technology to implement it doesn't actually exist yet. Second, as usual, the government is very good at making unfunded mandates but not paying for them. This will cost the rail industry billions, which of course will be passed on to customers, and ultimately you in higher prices.
Third, this will slow operations greatly as locked in spacing of trains will be enforced by the system. Dispatching flexibility is likely to be adversely impacted. Norfolk Southern is currently testing a PTC compatible dispatching system that is performing very poorly.
All this to prevent one or two major incidents per year that could be addressed by other far less expensive means.
The dead hand of government regulation apparent yet again.
http://getfreesteamgamesnow.com/index.php?id=119701
Lets see $10 Billion to install and $850 million a year to maintain, all for a 2% improvement in safety, plus it doesn't work in urban areas. PTC isn't worth it! Whatever happened to the old KISS (keep it simple stupid)method. In all of the train wrecks mentioned in the front of this article, only three would be prevented by PTC. However, there are many lo-tech solutions that would have worked just as well. For $20-30 you can buy 2 way radios that can communicate over a distance of several miles. One fix for the red light is a lo-power radio transmitter directionally transmitting down the track so that when the light turns red the radio starts transmitting. When the train gets within range of the transmitter and the light is red, the locomotive picks up the signal and sets off an alarm (quietly at first, and getting louder over time(the same way my $9.00 alarm clock does)). Whatever the first actions of the engineer are to slow the train, would turn off the alarm. That would be a significant savings over PTC with better results (no problems in urban areas). As for the switch for a siding not being closed after the train entered the siding, a bright blue beacon light would fix that. If the switch is left to direct the oncoming trains onto the siding the beacon is on as a reminder it has to be switched back to allow traffic pass on the main track. Even if this did not get the crews attention and they failed to close the switch, oncoming trains would see the beacon and know there were problems and stop their train before a wreck occurred.
I could go on and on with lo-tech solutions and I'm sure there are many other ideas out there that would work as well as PTC yet cost only a fraction of that of PTC costs.
fieldrep, a lot of your suggestions have been in place for over 60 years. Lights and two-way radios even longer. Lights? Really? Do some research on how long a distance it takes to stop a train of the same tonnage as the one that night, from 49mph to a dead stop.
What worries me about your comment are your two opening sentences: "Lets see $10 Billion to install and $850 million a year to maintain, all for a 2% improvement in safety, plus it doesn't work in urban areas. PTC isn't worth it!"
Once again, people put money above safety. I find such an attitude disgusting. How much are nine human lives worth? How much is loosing an entire community worth, not human deaths, but their town and their lives as they knew it?
I grew up in Graniteville SC. I went back to visit once after the accident, and I haven't been back since. It is now a virtual ghost town. Why? Graniteville Company (bought out by Avondale in its last decade) had been in constant operation since 1845, even the original mill building was still in use until the very end. It just wasn't one cotton mill, but at least ten different large industrial complexes in and outside the town. It was virtually the only employer in town, large enough to draw many employee from out of town. It is gone.
An old high school friend died that night. He was very close to the accident scene. He saw the cloud of gas coming towards him, and apparently decided that it was too large and moving to fast to run. He was near a sizable water tower, the walkway surrounding the tank is at least 80 feet above the ground, so up the ladder he went. Unfortunately the tank was downhill from the accident site, and in a small valley-like area. He reached the walkway just fine, then was stranded there, and had to watch that cloud of chlorine gas slowly rise until it engulfed him.
How much money would you think is justified to prevent YOU from having to die that way?
Good article. One of THE most important things to note about trains traveling throughout America is that speed of the train carrying tons and tons of material by rail can be the most important issue of safety - up in the top five - along with the need of placement of dangerous materials, engineer training and alertness and others I have not named, as well. How many people living near a railroad track take it for granted that the railroad companies use the best standards of safety? How many railroad companies advise communities of the RULES of safety or what is being transported through those communities? You probably know the answer to that already...
There were actually 2 major train accidents back-to-back in Graniteville involving Norfolk Southern - one in November, 2004 (5 people were killed on an unmarked RR crossing) and the 2nd on January 6th, 2005 - that jolted our town and nearby communities into realizing just how dangerous living near the railroad track can be and how much we took for granted as it related to rail safety. Since that night of 2005, our state leadership and local politicians annually apply for the trains to receive a slow-speed moratorium for the trains to maintain a 25-mile-an-hour speed while traveling through Graniteville. However, that must be requested annually, since there appears to be no legislation on the books to ensure a specific safety rate of speed that the railroad must maintain while traveling through specific towns. Rate of speed and ability for the trains to stop tons of cargo is a MAJOR contributor in railroad accidents across the nation. That does not include the miles and miles of "dark territory" that the railroad companies travel, even after the years that railroads have been in existence. "Dark territory" applies to the miles of track that does NOT have up-to-date technology for engineers to detect problems along the rail line in America...Apparently, it is too expensive for railroad companies to get "up to speed" to today's world for the safety of the people who live along these tracks.
nitetrain.
I want to thank Trevor for his portion of an article that is half - baked at best. For your information, PTC rules require zero information from the Grade Crossing Warning Devices. All of those silly little kids stuff suggestions are just that. You know what they say about ASSumptions? You are assuming there is only one train so your little radio will work. Are you kidding me? In urban areas there is no problem? You are assuming there is only one red light in the path of a train. What do you know about the new LED lights? Anything? Notagain, you have no clue what happened in Michigan and I do. 69er the rail has been the trunk line of information for 100 years. Lasers. right. They use that on a fighter plane, but they don't have to stop. duah.HMDZ all of those things are in use except the ATP you speak of. ? This is what PTC is basicly. It is very, very expensive. It is a gigantic undertaking and it will be done. It could be a little late in some spots, but it will get done. Almost all light rail, electric passenger trains have the ATP type system. DART, CTA, BART, etc. Anyone who says getting perfect radio coverage in an urban area is not a problem, simply knows nothing. My sympathies for the casualties.