How To Prevent America's Next Train Crash

Long-overdue rail upgrades could prevent the next big train catastrophe. So why are the railroads so reluctant to make them?

By Dan Baum Posted 01.17.2013 at 9:00 am 14 Comments

Graniteville's Wreckage : AP Photo/Environmental Protection Agency

If I lose my iPhone, Apple’s Find My iPhone feature will pinpoint its location anywhere in the world within a few feet. Railroads, though, have only a very rough idea, at any given moment, of where their 18,000-ton freight trains are and what they’re doing. Although each railroad operates vast control rooms that look like they belong on the set of Dr. Strangelove—with enormous electronic schematics of their tracks displayed across the walls—the information that controllers receive is amazingly crude.

Railroads have only a very rough idea, at any given moment, of where their 18,000-ton freight trains are and what they're doing.First, about half the nation’s trackage is “dark territory,” devoid of signals and invisible to controllers. Out there, it’s 1850. Conductors operate by written instructions and their watches, stopping their trains and climbing down to open and close switches by throwing big iron bars. While it’s true that the vast majority of freight traffic and all passenger traffic travels on tracks with signals, even there, controllers can’t see their trains the way I can “see” my lost iPhone. They know only when a train has passed a given point—a switch or a signal that is wired into the grid. Those points are anywhere from one and a half to three miles apart, creating “blocks” of track. Controllers know when a train’s locomotive has entered or left a block, but not how fast it’s moving. They can talk to engineers by radio, but if they notice that a train has passed a red signal, all they can do is shout into the radio, and often they’re too late even for that.

Positive train control, as conceived today, is intended not to replace control rooms and signals but to supplement them. The railroad farthest along in post-Chatsworth implementation is, not surprisingly, Metrolink, which lost 24 passengers and an engineer on September 12, 2008.

At six o’clock one recent morning, Darrell Maxey, who’s in charge of building Metrolink’s PTC system, picked me up at my hotel at the far eastern end of the L.A. basin and drove immediately to a doughnut shop. In his mid-fifties, with a bristle-gray moustache and glasses, Maxey exudes a Midwestern-style bemusement at the breathtaking convolutions of his job. He’s an old railroader, a systems engineer by training, but installing positive train control at Metrolink is making him an IT guy as well. “This is the most complicated project I’ve ever worked on,” he said. “Two, three hundred pages of documents at a time! For a guy who’s made his career piecing railroad systems together, this is heaven.”

We drove to Metrolink’s maintenance yard, a sprawling, sun-blasted expanse of concrete where Maxey issued me a hard hat and reflective vest, hoisted himself aboard one of Metrolink’s test trains’ passenger cars, and ushered me up after him. Slumped on every seat and scattered across the floor were hefty sandbags, simulating the weight of a full load of passengers. We walked forward, and Maxey opened a door to the back of the locomotive. We threaded our way through the length of its interior, which felt like the engine room of a U-boat: hot, noisy, and diesel-pungent. We emerged into the sunlit engineer’s cab, and Maxey motioned me into the engineer’s seat.

Transforming railroads from a 19th- to a 21st-century mode of transportation means making the train itself responsible for its actions. Were I this train’s engineer, I’d start my day by downloading into the train’s onboard computer a program about that day’s run: the weight and length of the train, as well as everything the system needs to know about the upcoming length of track, such as speed restrictions, grade, curves, signals, switches, and stops. If I were using track owned by other railroads, I’d download a separate program for each, because every railroad has its own way of signaling and communicating. Another download would alert me to temporary issues, such as workmen on the tracks. I could watch these downloads on an LCD screen mounted on the engine’s dash; after that, I wouldn’t have to look at the screen again, and, in fact, Metrolink is hoping I won’t. It wants my eyes straight ahead.

As I start down the track, the onboard computer is constantly comparing the train’s progress to the downloaded programs. Doing this means communicating wirelessly with every switch and signal along the way. If I fail to slow when I should or if the computer thinks I’m about to run a red signal, the system warns me. If I don’t respond, it applies the air brakes and shuts down the train. It is designed never to let my locomotive pass a red signal, so it is constantly looking six miles—three signals—ahead. It measures the speed and weight of the train along with the steepness of the grade. A heavy train going downhill will get an earlier warning than a light train going uphill, but as a rule of thumb, it takes about a mile, or 90 seconds, to stop a three-car Metrolink train.

The onboard electronics that make positive train control work on Metrolink’s test train are stuffed into a tiny compartment down in the nose of the locomotive, where, were this a freight train, the engineer’s toilet might be. I peered in at an incomprehensible tangle of wires surrounding a rank of plastic and aluminum boxes: a cellular modem, data radios that communicate with signals and the control room, a train management computer containing the downloads, and a big orange “black box” that the NTSB looks for after a crash. It goes by the polite euphemism “event recorder.”

For an industry that operates in much of the country as though it’s in a western, this looked like a jump to Prometheus. We made our way back through the locomotive and stepped off, and Maxey pointed to the new adornments on the locomotive’s roof. Up where a light and maybe a radio antenna used to sit, a forest of aerials sprouted: two 220MHz antennas for the data radios, two cellular antennas for redundancy, a GPS antenna, and the Wi-Fi antenna through which the train downloads its instructions prior to departure. “What all this is for, basically, is to make it impossible for you to speed or run a red light,” Maxey said. It sounded simple.

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14 Comments

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suggestivesimon

01/17/13 at 12:28 pm

Great article. Thank you.

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Robot

01/17/13 at 12:51 pm

'I think I can' not!
'I think I can' not!
I not.

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gizmowiz

01/17/13 at 2:02 pm

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.

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johnt007871

01/17/13 at 3:10 pm

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.

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laurenra7

01/17/13 at 4:07 pm

$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?

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johnt007871

01/17/13 at 4:23 pm

@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.

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Jellybelly

01/17/13 at 4:51 pm

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!

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laurenra7

01/17/13 at 6:58 pm

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.

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Railronin

01/17/13 at 7:21 pm

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 ,

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tmarti69

01/18/13 at 2:44 am

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.

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nkfro

01/18/13 at 1:31 pm

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?

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466lex

01/19/13 at 7:47 pm

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.

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Minecraftgenious

01/25/13 at 11:49 am

I really think they should have automated trains

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quasi44

01/27/13 at 1:03 pm

@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.