(The following story by Alfonso A. Castillo appeared on the Newsday website on September 17.)
NEW YORK — In the wake of Friday’s train collision near Los Angeles that claimed 25 lives, a term familiar to those in the railroad industry for two decades is suddenly attracting a lot of buzz – positive train control.
“PTC” refers to an electronic fail-safe system that, using GPS technology, could slow down and even stop a train that’s moving too fast or going somewhere it shouldn’t – including toward an oncoming train. It essentially takes over the controls when an engineer is distracted or unable to operate the train.
But while the National Transportation Safety Board has been calling for the development of PTC systems on railways throughout the country since 1990 – and researching such systems as far back as the 1970s – they exist today only on a few hundred miles of train tracks across the country. And only a few rail systems are seriously developing the technology.
The Long Island Rail Road is not among them. While LIRR officials said they have studied PTC and its benefits for years, and held meetings about possible implementation of such a system, ultimately the limitations of the technology have made it a non-starter.
“It’s something that we have looked at and are continuing to look at, but we have in place an automatic speed control system that has worked very well for us for the last 30 years,” said LIRR spokesman Joe Calderone.
Although based on technology that has been in place for at least 50 years, the LIRR’s “automatic speed control system” has many similarities to state-of-the-art PTC technology. The LIRR’s system alerts an engineer when a train is going faster than authorized, and if he or she doesn’t respond, the system will automatically slow down a train or even apply the brakes and stop it.
But PTC systems operate on “predictive” rather than “reactive” technology, said Thomas White, spokesman for the Association of American Railroads, an industry group that represents the nation’s major freight train providers and Amtrak.
PTC systems work with transponders placed along tracks that communicate with engineers via satellite GPS to let them know about conditions ahead and about unique speed restrictions in different jurisdictions. And when all else fails, it will stop a train.
But some kinks still need to be ironed out, White said, including designing a system compatible with all railways in the country and configuring it to properly calculate such issues as the size and weight of a train and the grade and curvature of tracks to properly apply the brakes.
The technological limitations and high cost of PTC systems – in the tens of millions of dollars for a few hundred miles of track – has turned off some rail providers.
Illinois, which once hosted a sort of national pilot project for PTC, abandoned it last year and is now looking to adopt a similar technology to that used by the LIRR, Illinois Department of Transportation Railroad Chief George Weber said.