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Feds Order Amtrak To Turn On System That Would've Prevented Crash
McGruber writes: Last Tuesday evening, northbound Amtrak Northeast Regional train No. 188 derailed on a curve in Philadelphia, killing eight passengers. The train was traveling in excess of 100 mph, while the curve had a passenger-train speed limit of 50 mph. In response, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is issuing formal emergency orders that will require Amtrak to make sure automatic train control systems work Northbound through Philadelphia at and near the site of the derailment. The FRA is also requiring that Amtrak assess the risk of all curves along the NEC and increase the amount and frequency of speed limit signs along the railroad. FRA's emergency order is newsworthy because Amtrak's existing signal system could have been configured to prevent a train from exceeding speed limits, according to the Wall Street Journal.
There are many sections where speeds reach 120mph.
Trains are fast, bro.
Senators don't ride trains
For 36 years, Senator Joe Biden commuted by Amtrak. If he were still a Senator he'd still be riding the train.
Wall Street Analyst Encouraged Rail Company to Lobby Against Train Safety Rules
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/15/wall-street-analyst-demanded-rail-industry-invest-lobbying-train-speed-safety-regulations/
By Lee Fang (@lhfang)
05/15/2015 11:26 AM
Positive Train Control, a technology system used to monitor trains and automatically keep them from reaching unsafe speeds, would likely have prevented the tragic Amtrak derailment earlier this week and many other train crashes in recent years, according to the National Transportation Safety Board and train safety experts.
But ever since Congress passed a law in 2008 requiring train companies to implement PTC by the end of 2015, the railroad industry has mounted a ferocious lobbying campaign to delay the rule.
Amtrak, like many other railroads, has been slow to comply. The federal government has been accommodating. And most recently, senators have been fighting primarily over how long an extension should be granted.
Train companies did not want to invest the needed funds to upgrade their systems. But they may have been feeling direct pressure from Wall Street, as well.
In one revealing exchange during an investor call in 2009, Jason Seidl, then a financial analyst with the Dahlman Rose & Co. investment bank, asked Wick Moorman, the chief executive of Norfolk Southern Corp., what “you guys can do in terms of lobbying” on the PTC. And given the costs of complying with the PTC rule, the analyst wanted to know how future investments might be impacted.
Moorman said he and other rail executives were busy working to “educate members of Congress as to what the implications of this legislation are.” Seidl encouraged Moorman to “further educate” them.
Lobbying and other government records show the rail industry extensively sought to influence the Federal Railroad Administration and Congress on the PTC rules. Individual rail companies, including Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific, CSX, Canada National Railway Company, among others, hired a small army of lobbyists.
But the largest and most prominent lobbying group to work to delay and weaken the PTC rule was the American Association of Railroads, which employed a veritable who’s who of D.C. consultants and lobbyists, including:
— Linda Daschle, the wife of former Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle, was paid to lobby on the PTC on behalf of the Association of American Railroads.
— The bipartisan lobbying duo of Max Sandlin and Vin Weber, both former congressmen, are registered with the American Association of Railroads to lobby on the PTC. Weber, an advisor to Jeb Bush, is also on the board of the American Action Network, a GOP dark money group that spends millions on election campaigns.
— Another bipartisan lobbying team, including former Sen. John Breaux, D-La., and former Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., is registered to lobby on behalf of the American Association of Railroads on PTC.
— The tax returns for the American Association of Railroads lists SKDKnickerbocker as a consultant for public relations and advertising throughout 2011 and 2012. SKDK is a public affairs firm led by senior Democratic staffers including former White House communications director Anita Dunn and CNN contributor Hilary Rosen. SKDK did not return a call requesting information about what services the firm provided for AAR, or if they continue to count AAR as a client.
— Former National Transportation Safety Board Kathryn Higgins was registered on behalf of AAR to lobby on the PTC.
— Former Rep. William Lipinski, D-Ill., was registered on behalf of the AAR to lobby on PTC. Lipinski’s son Dan is now a member of Congress who serves on the House Transportation Committee.
Engineers have complained about the influence of the train
This headline is misleading. We don't yet know what caused the crash, so it's a leap to say PTC could have prevented it.
No, your comment is what is misleading. The FRA's emergency order is about Automatic Train Control (ATC), not Positive Train Control ("PTC"). The difference is explained in the final paragraph of the Trains magazine article linked to in the summary:
Automatic train control is a system that will slow or stop a train that is moving too fast for a given stretch of track between installed control points based on signals for the area.....Positive train control is the generic name for train control systems that would slow or stop a train that is moving too fast anywhere along a PTC-covered section of track based on computer-updated speed restrictions and conditions and in areas where train crews are performing maintenance./quote?
In France too, we have the "ligne 14" in Paris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... which was completely automatic from the beginning and the "ligne 1", which has been automated since 2013.
I'm baffled that we just might get self driving cars before self driving trains.
Do I really have to state the obvious? It's on *rails*.
We have self-driving trains, but somebody needs deal with the inevitable delays and malfunctioning signals at winter and look out the window to check people do not get stuck in the door, etc. The self-driving once are usually in mostly underground metros where each station is manned, or a personel can get to within 5 minutes if the need arrises.
I don't care how many people per day or per anything else ride the rails - why should I subsidize their ticket prices?
Here's just one article that talks about the subsidies and where they lie. The northeast regional routes of Amtrak was making over $200 million in profit each year. Once Amtrak became a foster-child of the federal government the federal government started interfering. Most of the money-losing routes that Amtrak operates are there because of demands from local members of Congress in order to gain their support for more subsidies.
Here's another article highlighting that Amtrak's operating law required them to become profitable by 2002. That didn't happen.
I'll relish in those years where I can drive like a mad man and all those self driving cars will part like the red sea.
And those self-driving cars who will at the same time catch you on video and upload the footage to your insurance company and local traffic authorities.....
There are a bunch of things going on here so bear with me.
1. The speed immediately before the curve is 80mph. The curve itself is rated for 80mph but the official speed limit is 50. Why the difference? Because rail companies take passenger comfort seriously and 80mph through that curve would require passengers wear seatbelts and might possibly cause slight travel sickness. As an aside trains generally start at Philly by accelerating with an open (full) throttle. When they reach 80mph, it's usually at the point in the journey where the train now needs to slow to 50mph to pass the curve. Supposedly the brakes weren't activated and throttle closed, possibly because the driver was distracted by having a rock thrown at him, but... WE DON'T KNOW THIS and the headline of this story is premature.
2.Both ATC and PTC do as you describe. They include mechanisms to monitor the speed of trains and slow them if they're speeding. PTC even includes a GPS element. ATC is older, creakier, but...
3. ATC was not installed on the section immediately North of Philly because, reportedly, Amtrak engineers at the time didn't believe any trains would actually reach 80mph before hitting that curve. This was probably true at the time.
4. In the last year, Amtrak has introduced new locomotives, including the one used for Amtrak 188. These locomotives are considerably more powerful than the "Meatballs" they replaced.
So, that's currently the thinking. The most likely scenario right now appears to be that the engineer was distracted by rocks being thrown at the train at the critical moment where he was supposed to close the throttle and engage the brakes. Because it was a newer, more powerful, locomotive than the safety systems there were originally designed for, the train was able to accelerate to 105mph during that distracted period. Because there were no ATC or PTC systems active in that area, the train wasn't stopped automatically.
That's the _most likely_ scenario. There are many other possibilities, including a software problem on the locomotive (which, depending on the nature of the bug) could have rendered PTC or ATC ineffectual given they rely upon the loco to, you know, respond to its commands. The latter is unlikely, but it hasn't been ruled out yet.
We should do what commonsense requires, the accident may or may not have been caused by a lack of ATC, but we do know now that there exists the possibility of speed related accidents in that area and need it to be addressed. In the mean time, we should wait for the NTSB to do its job.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
the evidence from NYC and other large cities is that people have devices called legs that can transport them autonomously for several blocks if necessary from the subway station to their job
there are also possibly apocryphal tales of things called "platforms" where people wait for trains that don't necessarily run every minute