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

A Turning Point?: On September 12, 2008, a Metrolink commuter train collided with a Union Pacific freight train in Chatsworth, California, killing 24 people and injuring 101. AP Photo/Ryan Ling

To disabuse me of that notion, Maxey drove us to a wayside signal being outfitted for positive train control. Until now, such signals were nothing but big traffic lights—red, yellow, green—on steel posts. “Dumb” is the technical term; all they could do was change color. Maxey took a key from his pocket and unlocked the steel door on a small, windowless concrete shed that stood beside the signal. “Each of these has its own IP address now,” he said. “As the train goes along, it pings each signal, and if it doesn’t get a response, it shuts down the train because the unresponsive signal might be red.” He opened the shed door to a blast of cold air. “Got to be air-conditioned,” he said. “Some little switch houses are 170 degrees inside.” The shed was as stuffed with electronic gear as the nose of the train. “This all has to stand up to vibration, dirt, and rain,” Maxey said, and in case the air-conditioning fails, “it’s got to spec to 70 degrees Celsius, which is 158 Fahrenheit.”

Metrolink has 217 such wayside signals; modifying each one will cost $50,000. “The Class I’s have as many as 38,000 of these,” Maxey said, “which helps explain their lack of enthusiasm.”

Metrolink used to be an organization of railroaders—men accustomed to mechanical challenges wrought in iron. But with the move to positive train control, the railroad is acquiring a corps of IT types; they fill one of the biggest buildings I’ve ever seen. It’s an old General Dynamics cruise-missile factory a quarter-mile long that Metrolink slicked up with a big glass atrium, potted trees, and interior floor-to-ceiling windows. As Maxey walked me through, he kept buttonholing people and asking them to describe their résumés. I met electrical engineers, systems engineers, IT specialists, software developers. “See?” Maxey said. “See who we are here? This is the new face of railroading. Building the system is not the only challenge; it’s maintaining it for years to come. We’re just incredibly excited.”

* * *

By “we,” Maxey meant Metrolink. Maxey and his colleagues are convinced that positive train control will put an end to the kind of engineer-caused disasters that occurred at Graniteville and Chatsworth. The major freight railroads, though, sound like 15-year-old boys being asked to mow the lawn.

The Class I’s knew better than to object when Congress was passing the law mandating positive train control in the wake of the Chatsworth wreck. Bellyaching at such an emotional moment would have looked insensitive. Not a single interest group took a position on the law as it was being debated in 2008. Three years later, though, when four Republican senators introduced a bill to delay the 2015 deadline for implementing positive train control, railroads suddenly became interested in congressional politics; they gave a total of almost $3.6 million to all but four members of the Senate, including $16,500 to Diane Feinstein and $47,800 to Barbara Boxer, two of the biggest proponents of positive train control when the original law was passed in 2008. Despite the shower of money, the bill to extend the deadline died without a vote, but that doesn’t mean the railroads have given up the fight. They’ll tell anybody who will listen that positive train control will cost too much, isn’t worth the money, places an undue burden on railroads and their customers, will make rail shipping less, instead of more, efficient, and is being forced upon them too quickly.

The Federal Railroad Administration says that building positive train control could end up costing $10 billion. Even at a time when the Class I’s are doing well—profit margins ran from 17 to 45 percent last year—$10 billion is a lot of money, roughly equal to everything the railroad industry spent on buildings and equipment in 2010. Maintaining the intricate system will cost the industry an additional $850 million a year.

For that, the railroads will get a system that would have prevented the marquee Chatsworth, Red Oak, and Graniteville wrecks but would do nothing to prevent 98 percent of train accidents, including the types that cause the most deaths: knuckleheads walking on tracks or trying to zip across road crossings ahead of speeding trains.

Chatsworth Collision: The disaster prompted the federal government to require railroads to install positive train control systems—which could have prevented the crash—on 70,000 miles of track nationwide. AP Photo/Reed Saxon

And even that 2 percent of collisions will be prevented only if the system works well. The GPS used in positive train control doesn’t work in tunnels or urban canyons. And the cellular backup will have to have a reliability rate of one failure in every hundred million tries. “Compare that to dropped cellphone calls,” says George Bibel, author of Train Wreck: The Forensics of Rail Disasters.

The industry is going to have to acquire 58,000 digital radios of a type never built before, and because trains travel on other railroads’ tracks, each radio must be able to communicate with those of every other railroad. Several railroads, particularly in big cities, are having trouble getting enough bandwidth in the crowded radio spectrum to launch the system. Ask a railroader to describe the technical challenges of implementing positive train control, and you can expect to listen for a while.

In 1977, Mother Jones magazine broke the story that the Ford Motor Company had concluded, when its Pinto was blowing up with frightening regularity, that it was cheaper to pay the widows and orphans than it was to recall the cars and fix the problem. That cold-blooded cost-benefit analysis caused a scandal. Yet for the past three decades, since President Ronald Reagan ordered cabinet departments and independent agencies to conduct cost-benefit analyses before issuing new regulations, such computations have been national policy.

In the case of positive train control, the Federal Railroad Administration needed to weigh the benefits of avoiding the tiny category of accidents that the system would prevent against the projected costs. Totaling up the cost of wrecked equipment was fairly easy—and so, it turns out, was computing the value of the human lives that positive train control would save. The Federal Railroad Administration’s parent agency, the Department of Transportation, had already done the math, concluding in 2008 that “the best present estimate of the economic value of preventing a human fatality is $5.8 million.”

When the Federal Railroad Administration counted the average seven annual deaths and 22 injuries positive train control would prevent in a year and added the cost of the property damage and evacuations that positive train control would obviate, it concluded that positive train control would save the industry just $90 million a year. That’s just a tenth of the system’s annual maintenance costs, and a wretched cost-benefit prospect—unless you or somebody you love is one of the seven people saved.

Every freight railroad to which I spoke, as well as the industry group the Association of American Railroads, inveighed against being forced to implement positive train control, especially by the end of 2015. Some even claim it will make their lines less safe. In an e-mail, Kansas City Southern warned me darkly: “The inflexibility of the statutory mandate and its deadline is likely to result in previously unforeseen operating consequences if not modified”; Union Pacific told me it would rather spend the money on “proven safety alternatives”; and Luther Diggs of Philadelphia’s commuter line SEPTA told the local Inquirer, “We won’t have one bridge or substation or station until we get this paid for. It just means we don’t do a lot of other things.” In other words, if a train rolls off a poorly maintained track, blame Congress for rushing the railroads to implement positive train control.

But it’s hard to sympathize with the railroads. The 2 percent of accidents that PTC could prevent includes the most catastrophic possibilities—the black-swan big ones, like tankers of chlorine bursting open within a mile of the National Mall. Call it the tyranny of technology in a litigious age: If a technological fix that may save lives is available, you’re pretty well obliged to apply it.

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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.