House to vote on 3-year extension of PTC deadline as part of stop-gap highway bill

The extension of the Dec. 31 deadline for implementation of Positive Train Control for an additional three years has been added to a three-week transportation funding measure in the House as Congress scrambles to complete long-term legislation.    A stop-gap measure in Congress to temporarily ensure the continuation of federal transportation for three weeks includes a provision that would extend the deadline for implementation of Positive Train Control until the end of 2018, possibly averting a partial shutdown of major railways.
   The House is expected to vote Tuesday on extending transportation funding through Nov. 20, giving the Senate two days to pass the measure before the current three-month extension expires on Oct. 29. Lawmakers will use the extra time to finalize a long-term transportation bill. 
   Freight and passenger railroads say an extension of Positive Train Control (PTC) is needed by the end of the month to prevent the start of an orderly shutdown that requires about two months to complete.
   PTC is a wireless communication system that can override a conductor to slow or stop a train to prevent an accident. Supporters of the system have claimed it will drastically improve railroad safety for both passenger and cargo movement, but railways have complained that the current Dec. 31 deadline doesn’t give them enough time to implement and certify the complicated system. It requires networking together communications, navigation and adaptive braking technologies on tracks, signal systems and locomotives so trains can automatically decrease speed and stop to avoid collisions or derailments.
   Adding to the complexity is the fact that many different railroads connect with each other, have interchange agreements and often operate on other railroads’ tracks. As a result, all train operations need to be interoperable and able to talk to one another.
   Many railroads, including Amtrak, CSX, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern and BNSF, have threatened to shut down entire sections of track rather than be subject to steep fines and increased liability as of Jan. 1.
   “If Congress fails to extend the deadline, freight and passenger railroads may have little choice but to suspend commuter service and sharply curtail freight shipments,” the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) and the Association of American Railroads (AAR) said in a joint statement last week. “This would affect the 26 commuter rail systems providing 1.7 million trips daily and 90 freight railroads that provide essential goods to communities across the country.”
   The U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report in September that said none of the nation’s four major Class 1 railroads expect to meet the deadline. The GAO report gave an estimated PTC compliance date for BNSF of December 2017, for Union Pacific of December 2018, and for both CSX and Norfolk Southern of 2020.
   The new agreement would extend the current deadline to Dec. 31, 2018 at the earliest, with an option for railroads to request an additional two years provided they submit implementation plans by the end of 2018. Those requests would then be approved by the Department of Transportation on a case-by-case basis.
   The extension was included in the six-year $325 billion transportation and infrastructure funding bill that the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee sent to the House floor for a full vote, but getting a long-term bill reconciled with the Senate’s version is expected to take another three or four weeks.
   The Senate approved its own six-year surface transportation bill, the DRIVE Act, which included a PTC extension provision, on July 30.
   The three-week funding extension does not include any new money because Congress added extra funds in the three-month transportation bill approved in July to allow for the possibility that a long-term measure would not be completed by then.
   “We are committed to getting this job completed. Freight railroads will have spent $6 billion by the end of this year and project that it will take about $10 billion to complete,” Edward Hamberger, president of the American Association of Railroads said last Monday in a teleconference with reporters. “It’s like having a home halfway built. You want to finish it, you want to move in. We want to get this operational so we can begin to take advantage of it.”
   Hamberger said freight railroads will have 12,000 miles installed by the end of the year, but PTC eventually needs to cover 70,000 track miles. In addition, 22,000 locomotives need to be outfitted with equipment and 32,000 communications towers need to be built.
   Even when equipment is installed, it must be extensively tested. Freight railroads, so far, are experiencing error rates more than a third of the time, according to Hamberger.
   “I just ask you if you’d want to get on an airplane with a new traffic control system that is experiencing a 30 to 40 percent error rate,” he said. “We have got to make sure that this is working.”
   Critics of the PTC agreement worry it could result in all railroads being given a free five-year pass on implementation of potentially life-saving technology, while supporters of the extension have applauded the inclusion of the deadline extension provision in the House highway bill.
   ”The legislation approved by the [House Transportation and Infrastructure] Committee brings the House closer to settling the PTC issue, but it is critical that Congress finish the job right away to avoid a shutdown of passenger and freight rail service,” American Chemistry Council President Cal Dooley said in a statement.
   “Imagine the impacts on our already congested roads if these trips were moved onto the nation’s overburdened roadways,” APTA President Michael Melaniphy said on the press call.
   The American Chemistry Council recently issued a study in which it estimates that a single month of rail service disruptions could reduce real GDP by 2.6 percent, pulling $30 billion out of the economy, causing the loss of 700,000 jobs and putting 600,000 more trucks on the road to move the freight that normally goes by rail.
   The trucking impact is partly theoretical because there isn’t enough equipment or driver capacity to pick up the slack, but the situation would likely result in steep rate increases for shippers.
   Railroads have indicated that the primary business categories they would cancel for safety reasons associated with PTC are passenger and hazardous material transportation, but other freight shipments could eventually be impacted too.
   “Retailers are now in the final phases of their peak shipping season for holiday merchandise. Any shutdown or slowdown of the freight rail system will have wide-ranging impacts on retailers and other freight rail customers,” the National Retail Federation said in a statement.
   The original Dec. 31 deadline for PTC was put in place in 2008, but the National Transportation Safety Board began calling for train control systems as far back as 1969. FRA was involved in setting up the PTC standards with transportation industry and safety stakeholders for more than a decade before the 2008 mandate.
   Three years before Congress passed the PTC mandate as part of the Rail Safety Improvement Act, FRA issued its final rule that established uniform PTC standards for railroads willing to voluntarily install the technology. That law required all Class I railroads transporting poisonous-by-inhalation hazardous or toxic-by-inhalation hazardous materials and all railroads providing passenger service to implement PTC by Dec. 31, 2015.
   Hamberger said Congress didn’t fully appreciate the scope and complexity of deploying PTC across the national rail system when it passed the mandate.
   Ongoing PTC challenges include a lack of radio spectrum, shortages of components and qualified personnel, the need for extensive training and testing, and a lack of funding for public operators of passenger services, Melaniphy said. Congress needs to direct the Federal Communications Commission to provide extra radio spectrum for railroads, he added.
   Many commuter railroads expect to largely be ready with installation of computers and radios on locomotives and cab cars that communicate with the system, but won’t be able run either because they are at the mercy of freight railroads on whose networks they run or because they lack the funds to install trackside equipment on their own networks. Passenger railroads estimate the cost to install PTC is $3.5 billion, but Congress has only provided $50 million so far, according to Melaniphy.