Positive Train Control Emerges Again as Issue After Latest Amtrak Derailment
Lack of positive train control was potentially a contributing cause of an Amtrak derailment Monday that killed three passengers and injured more than 100, as the train careened off a bridge outside Tacoma, Washington. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating and said Tuesday the train was traveling at 80 mph on a 30-mph stretch. PTC is designed in part to slow speeding trains through automatic breaking.
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"PTC would prevent types of accidents such as this," said NTSB board member Bella Dinh-Zarr in a news conference: "We should remember that PTC can't prevent every accident. It does prevent certain types of derailments, overspeed accidents as well as incursions into work zones."
The wreck was especially preventable since PTC had been installed on the section of track where it took place but hadn’t been turned on, former U.S. Department of Transportation Inspector General Mary Schiavo told us. Rollout of PTC nationally has been very slow, she said. “After each accident, Amtrak and other passenger railroads tout how much progress they have made,” she said. “Given the original deadline a couple of years ago … the problem is how many people now have died?”
Absence of PTC has been a factor in a number of recent wrecks, including a NJ Transit train last year (see 1609290067) and of an Amtrak crash in Philadelphia in 2015 (see 1505150047). The FCC acted to speed deployment of PTC after the 2015 crash and didn’t comment on the latest incident. Congress originally required U.S. railroads to have PTC in place by Dec. 31, 2015, but granted a three-year extension after railroads complained they couldn't launch everywhere along their systems by that deadline (see 1510290069).
The Washington State and Oregon departments of transportation jointly own the Amtrak Cascades train service. Amtrak operates the service for the two states as a contractor and referred questions Tuesday to Sound Transit, which own the tracks -- part of the new Point Defiance Bypass designed to give passenger trains access to track not shared with freight trains. The three didn’t comment. The Washington department's statement didn’t mention PTC or the cause of the derailment. Amtrak runs Cascades line trains from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Eugene, Oregon.
Railroads continue to seek extensions on the PTC requirements, Schiavo said. “It’s really going to take Congress to say no more extensions,” she said. “This is an infrastructure issue.” The bypass project cost $180 million “and now public opinion is such that maybe people don’t want this train,” she said. “Where was our infrastructure investment on that?”
Two Rail Passengers Association members were killed, which was making its initial run, the group said. Abe Zumwalt, director-policy research, told us PTC raises complicated policy issues. Unlike the move to air traffic control, mostly a federal initiative, PTC is an “unfunded mandate” that requires coordination of many partners with a stake in a particular passenger corridor, he said. “PTC is relatively new technology being applied to legacy infrastructure in a much more ad hoc fashion,” he said. “The way that we install technology and the way that it has been mandated, but not funded, should be recognized.”