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

The Way Forward: Metrolink is on schedule to beat the 2015 deadline for installing positive train control. Now the question is: Will the Class I freight railroads follow along? Ciro Cesar/LA Opinion

Of course, there also exists a very cheap way to help prevent train crashes: Let engineers sleep. The Federal Railroad Administration sets limits on how many consecutive hours an engineer can work but nonetheless lets railroads treat freight engineers, in the words of one, “like plug-in flashlights.” Engineers never know exactly when they’re going to be called to work, so they never know when they should sleep. A 56-year-old Midwestern engineer for a Class I, who asked me to withhold his name because he would be fired for talking to a reporter, described a typical, Catch-22 dialogue with his employer: “‘When do you want me to work?’ ‘I don’t know; I’ll call you.’ ‘Okay, should I go to bed now or stay up and watch TV?’ ‘That’s up to you; but I want you to be rested.’ ”

“You never know when you’re going to get a day off,” he told me. “There’s no lunch break. You have to eat at the controls. If you have to go to the bathroom, you wait until you’re going up a long hill and you know the train isn’t going to run away, and you open the back door and you pee off the walkway. You’re in a mode where you’re at 20 percent of your abilities. I’ve been dreaming at the switch.”

He and his union—the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers—have mixed feelings about positive train control, though, because they worry that it could make it easier for Class I freight lines to further reduce the size of a train’s crew. “In 1974, we had five guys on a crew: fireman, head brakeman, an engineer in the cab, and, in the caboose, a conductor and a rear brakeman,” he said. “Now we have two”: an engineer and a conductor in the cab. What positive train control will do, he fears, is “eliminate the conductor. If we have this PTC, there’s no reason we can’t run a train with one man.”

A Possible Solution: Click here to see this image larger. Trevor Johnston

Much as they revile the 2015 deadline for implementing positive train control, neither the individual railroads, the Association of American Railroads, nor the Federal Railroad Administration want to discuss adjusting working conditions as a means of improving safety. “You’re going down a whole path that is about labor negotiations and not about PTC,” said Union Pacific’s Jeff Young. “That’s not what I’m here to talk about.”

In general, companies would much rather buy equipment than meddle with their employees’ working conditions. Capital investment is deductible, predictable, and finite. Start making concessions to employees, and it can go anywhere—and the company will be living with the changes forever. For its part, Congress would much rather order companies to buy stuff than to poke its nose into employee relations. Every dollar the railroads spend on positive train control boosts the economy.

The Association sidestepped the issue of unpredictable sleep schedules in a written response, saying only that positive train control “was never intended to solve the problem of a locomotive engineer falling asleep,” an odd comment, as that is a big part of what it is intended to do. “The individual employee is responsible for managing their personal sleep and rest habits within the federally mandated rest periods.” In other words, if engineers are sleepy, blame them.

The Federal Railroad Administration says it lacks the authority to order railroads to give engineers regular hours (the way things are done, say, in Britain). Only Congress can do that, the FRA’s communication director Kevin Thompson told me. What the agency does in the meantime, Thompson said, is offer engineers “a website with techniques and tips to better manage their sleep issues.”

Now that they’ve tried and failed to get Congress to push back the 2015 deadline, the railroads are grudgingly committing to it. “You can argue it so long,” said Patti Reilly of the Association of American Railroads. “At a certain point, we want to do it, we want to do it well, and we want to do it so it doesn’t negatively affect our operation.” But by now they’ve spent so long fighting the 2015 deadline that it’s hard to see how they’ll meet it. Beyond 2015? Between the railroads’ institutional resistance and the technical challenges they face, don’t hold your breath.

On the other hand, given the lethality of the chemicals trundling around the nation’s rail lines 24/7 and the exhausted state of the engineers hauling them, maybe you should.

Dan Baum’s book Gun Guys: A Road Trip comes out in March. He lives in Boulder, Colorado. This article originally appeared in the February 2013 issue of the magazine.

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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.