Railroads at risk of missing PTC deadline

House subcommittee conducts hearing on “one of the most complex safety mandates ever undertaken by the railroad industry.”

   The House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials conducted a hearing Thursday on the implementation of positive train control in the United States.
   Written testimony and video from the hearing are available here.
  “This important, life-saving technology is one of the most complex safety mandates ever undertaken by the railroad industry,” said Subcommittee Chairman Jeff Denham, R-Calif., in his opening statement Thursday.
   Denham said nine railroads are at risk of not meeting federal deadlines for implementation.
   Positive Train Control, or PTC, is a radio- or GPS-based system designed to prevent train-to-train collisions, derailments, incursions into work zones and the movement of a train through a switch left in the wrong position.
   “From its inception a decade ago, Congress and stakeholders anticipated that the PTC mandate would be a daunting undertaking. PTC had never been implemented on such a large scale and has never required such a high level of interoperability,” Denham said.
   The Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 initially required that certain freight, commuter and passenger rail lines in the United States install PTC by Dec. 31, 2015. Congress extended that deadline to Dec. 31 of this year. 
   “According to the Association of American Railroads, freight railroads will spend $10.6 billion implementing PTC, with additional hundreds of millions each year to maintain,” Denham said. “The American Public Transportation Association has estimated that the commuter railroads will have to spend nearly $3.6 billion on PTC.
   “When Congress passed the bipartisan PTC Enforcement and Implementation Act of 2015, we heard from railroads that funding was an issue. We heard those concerns, and in the FAST Act, we authorized $197 million in PTC grant funding. Additionally, the FAST Act specifically prioritized PTC installation projects for Railroad Rehabilitation & Improvement Financing (RRIF) funding.  
   “In total, Congress made available more than $1 billion in grant funding for PTC implementation, in addition to financing programs like RRIF and the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA),” he said.
   Denham said while the railroads have achieved some significant improvements over the past year implementing the safety technology, nine railroads were at risk of not meeting statutory criteria required to qualify for an alternative schedule.
   “FRA currently considers any railroad that installed less than 90 percent of its PTC system hardware as of June 30, 2018, to be at risk, as installation of all PTC system hardware is only an initial phase of implementing a PTC system and only one of the six statutory criteria required to qualify for an alternative schedule,” Denham said.
   Witnesses at the hearing were Ronald L. Batory, administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration; Robert Sumwalt, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board; Susan A. Fleming, director of the physical infrastructure team in the Government Accountability Office; Scot Naparstek, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Amtrak; Edward Hamberger, president and chief executive officer of the Association of American Railroads; Jeffrey D. Knueppel, general manager of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority on behalf of the American Public Transportation Association; and Stacey Mortensen, executive director of the Altamont Corridor Express.