
BNSF Railyway Co. helped lead fight to delay train safety technology - jstreebin
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/04/railways-safety-lobby-idUSL1N12Y3P720151104
======
thasmin
Positive Train Control is the train safety technology at issue here. It isn't
ready. The "attempt at crippling the economy" is to shut down instead of
operating in violation of the regulation.

The railroad companies claim to have spent billions on implementation but it's
not available yet. As the article says, they're not allowed to collaborate or
share implementation costs because of trust regulations. Also keep in mind the
scale of the deployment. There's hundreds of thousands of cars on the track
today, and putting something on each car isn't something that takes an
afternoon.

The government can't make it happen by creating a regulation and a deadline.

edit: Fixed definition of PTC.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I don't think they have to put something on every (railroad) car. I think they
have to put something on every engine, and on every switch. What they put on
every switch has to talk to a network. There's a _lot_ of switches, and some
of those switches are in pretty remote places.

> Positive Track Control is the train safety technology at issue here.

I believe it's Positive _Train_ Control.

> The government can't make it happen by creating a regulation and a deadline.

Very much true, and a big surprise to too many regulators.

~~~
davismwfl
You are correct, not every car needs to be modified. Generally engines are the
primary modification, as is the CAD systems that must accept extra data and
pass it to the trains. Things like hotbox detectors that can count trains
axels, determine direction plus the switches and track occupation signals need
to also be sent from the CAD (which already receives them in controlled
territory) to the locomotive itself.

As a point, PTC works in both dark territory and controlled territory, because
it focuses on the train itself (but it isn't as reliable in dark territory).
Yes in controlled territory it has greater information but it doesn't require
every switch to be modified. Even back in the late 90's every controlled
switch reported back its status to CAD extremely quickly and CAD could control
the switches remotely. Yes, dark territory is different, but PTC had some
benefits even in dark territory. It was the long term goal to have near zero
dark territory where a switch, siding or other similar factor would be able to
cause a collision.

And just as a point, even when a train leaves one CAD controlled territory
(say Union Pacific territory) and enters another (say ran by BNSF) the CAD
operators hand off control, much like air traffic control. So the issue of
interoperability is minimal as it already is in place in at least a fairly
common form. Not saying it isn't without fault or couldn't be better, but the
world doesn't have to change overnight, just keep making progress on each part
making it better and better.

~~~
paddy_m
I assume by CAD you mean Computer Assisted Driving? What exactly is a dark
area?

What are the differences between the US PTC systems and the systems used in
Europe?

~~~
davismwfl
Computer aided dispatch. Essentially all trains are monitored via control
centers owned by a few of the larger railroads. Passenger traffic is even
handed off through these centers when crossing the territories.

And yes dark territory is what they call the areas that are unmonitored.
Usually these are way out in the middle of no where on single track. Most
monitoring believe it or not is hard wired and not wireless. For example, hot
box detectors which are basically buried on the inside of the tracks monitor a
trains bearing/axel temperatures and can report if one is over heating. This
is critical because it is a source of derailments. Those boxes though usually
are wired directly to lines running along the track and back to a common
point. In many cases a number of lines terminate at one location and are fed
to radio towers that beam that data back. In other cases it follows the fiber
all the way to a rail yard or dispatch center.

I can't say now what the differences are with PTC in Europe, but I know when I
was at GE we looked a lot at what they were doing because in most cases they
are far more serious about their railroads.

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ansible
This sounds callous, but 245 deaths in 45 years isn't that bad.

Yes, of course I would like safer trains. I would like safer lots of things,
especially cars, because so many more people have car accidents and die each
year.

Ideally, our government would calculate lives per year saved versus cost for
all kinds of proposed laws and regulations. And then we could more fairly
decide which things to implement first, based on which would save the most
lives.

This requires us to place a specific dollar figure on a human life, which
everyone seems reluctant to do.

~~~
rayiner
The government puts a specific dollar figure on human life all the time. It's
not afraid to do that.

But positive train control isn't just about improving safety. It's part of a
larger overhaul of the rail system that will allow increased efficiency. E.g.
the Acela is much heavier than European passenger trains because of FRA crash
standards. If PTC succeeds in reducing the likelihood of crashes and
derailments, those regulations could be loosened, allowing lighter and faster
trains.

~~~
gozo
That's something I don't get about US technologist. Everyone says they want
progress, but then there's always so many reasons why it shouldn't happen.

A related example would be which of these two road that are better suited for
self-driving cars or similar technologies:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US33SEOH.JPG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US33SEOH.JPG)

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MMLNorr1.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MMLNorr1.JPG)

~~~
Sanddancer
You need to keep in mind that US highways, as opposed to interstate highways,
tend to be roads of secondary importance these days. In the Los Angeles area,
for example, a lot of the formerly federal highways became state highways
after they were built up to freeway standards, due to various complicated
political reasons. Additionally, there are plenty of stretches of US33 which
are full divided highways, looking a lot like
[https://goo.gl/maps/6vc73fZ9nTz](https://goo.gl/maps/6vc73fZ9nTz). In
comparison, Swedish route 34 looks like
[https://goo.gl/maps/Ur45ukH7Yop](https://goo.gl/maps/Ur45ukH7Yop) outside of
town. So both roads are pretty much the same, all things considered, gaining
and losing features as the local traffic conditions call for them.

------
mjt0229
I'm no anti-government activist (far from it), and in general, I think safety
regulations are a good idea. But I'm having a hard time getting worked up over
this. Are the sort of train accidents that this technology would prevent
really so frequent or devastating that we should stop everything and fix it?
Especially compared to, say, guns, nutrition, pollution, etc? I mean, I'm all
for tackling low hanging fruit and making things safer, but I'm not sure how
much effort should go into this compared to other safety issues.

~~~
jessriedel
> So far, railroads have spent more than $2.7 billion on a system estimated to
> cost $10 billion to $14 billion — plus perhaps $1 billion in annual
> maintenance. PTC has not been installed, partly because it is not
> sufficiently developed. CSX Corp., which includes railroads among its
> assets, says the railroad industry is the nation’s most capital-intensive —
> and the $11 billion combined capital investments of all U.S. railroads in
> 2010 were approximately equal to the cost of PTC.

> The Federal Railroad Administration estimates that were PTC to be installed
> on thousands of locomotives and tens of thousands of miles of track, it
> would prevent perhaps 2 percent of the approximately 2,000 collisions and
> derailments, preventing seven deaths and 22 injuries annually.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-
positive...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-positive-
train-control-a-mandate-that-is-off-the-
rails/2013/05/31/a1f470ba-c981-11e2-9245-773c0123c027_story.html)

(That quote is the first I could easily find, and it comes from a George Will
article. If anyone suspects ideological distortion, I think they could find
more objective sources that will say basically the same thing.)

For comparison, the FDA, EPA, and Department of Transportation use ~$9 million
for the statistical value of a human life. If it costs more than that to save,
it's considered unreasonable and the funds could be better spent elsewhere.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Life_Value_in_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Life_Value_in_the_US)

------
cnorthwood
The article quotes AAR spokesman Ed Greenburg as "We have been warning for
years that the deadline was unworkable because the technology had to be
developed from scratch."

Why does such technology need to be developed from scratch? Positive Train
Control sounds very similar to the in-cab signalling schemes (European Train
Control System) in use in Europe on the Eurostar and other high-speed lines,
and is continuing to roll out on other lines, would adapting that technology
not make a good start?

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
All that European stuff uses metric.

~~~
pacaro
There isn't that much difference between 1435 mm and 4 ft 8½

------
osi
In the Chicago area, the Metra commuter rail system was saying they would have
to discontinue service at the end of the year if the PTC requirement wasn't
delayed due to their delays in getting it implemented. It isn't just freight
lobbying.

~~~
phkahler
>> In the Chicago area, the Metra commuter rail system was saying they would
have to discontinue service at the end of the year if the PTC requirement
wasn't delayed due to their delays in getting it implemented. It isn't just
freight lobbying.

Does that mean they'd go bankrupt? Could someone then buy them for cheap and
implement PTC and take over the business? Sometimes it's nice to entertain the
idea of "let them fail".

~~~
arthurdenture
Nope. Commuter service in Chicago is contracted out to big players like BNSF
and Union Pacific. If they were to lose the contract to run Metra trains, they
would be fine.

And it's not like there's some other company or agency waiting to make PTC
happen for millions instead of billions.

~~~
noer
Not all of it, BNSF & UP only operate the services with their names in the
lines, Metra operates the remainder of the services.

~~~
dredmorbius
The trackage is owned by the railroads. They're the ones responsible for
implementing the fixed-position part of PTC.

------
mschuster91
Hmm how about nationalizing the infrastructure, mandate safety technologies
and allow private companies to compete on common grounds to prevent a race to
the bottom?

~~~
mulmen
So if I understand you correctly the railroads would basically be the same as
the Interstate highway system?

I don't know enough about how the railroads work to comment on how feasible
such an arrangement would be.

Does the government currently subsidize railroad maintenance and/or
construction?

Edit: Is there a precedent anywhere else in the world for nationalized
railways?

~~~
jcranmer
Nationalized railways are the norm rather than the exception in much of the
world. Interestingly enough, the US has a much higher fraction of freight
traffic move by rail than most of those with nationalized railways.

~~~
ant6n
I think this is largely due to the greater shipping distances (rail gets
cheaper relative to trucking as the distances gets greater), and maybe a bit
the lack of interference from passenger rail.

Btw, in Europe many networks are state owned, some are privately owned. By
open-access regulation forces every track-owner to open their tracks for a fee
to other operators. There's also a distinction between track-owners and track-
operators, even if a single company may be both.

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nigrioid
Buffett is also the reason Obama won't let the Keystone pipeline happen. The
crude is shipped by rail.

~~~
ewanmcteagle
Buffett is on record supporting the pipeline.

~~~
nigrioid
I think his closeness and donations to Obama and friends carries more weight
than an interview answer...

~~~
parasubvert
I think you are placing far too much faith in the power of one actor vs. The
fact this has been a Democratic base purity test for a few years. Plus crude-
over-rail is barely 10% of all oil movement (vs. Pipelines).

------
pstuart
We should nationalize the railways, then invest in the infrastructure to make
it safe to carry freight and passengers. Then allow for competition in the
"railway marketplace".

