Amtrak submitted a letter to Congress outlining an additional $1.475 billion in supplemental funding needed in FY 2021. The additional funding is necessary for Amtrak to operate minimum service levels across the passenger rail network and continue capital investments for the future, the letter said.
It’s not often that I find myself in agreement with the National Transportation Safety Board. Not only is it infrequent, it’s downright uncomfortable. Truth be told, nothing worries me more than finding myself in agreement with a government agency, or a panel of experts, or the vice president operations of whatever railroad I happen(ed) to be working for at the time.
U.S. Senators John Thune (R-S.D.), a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) recently introduced the Railroad Rehabilitation and Financing Innovation Act (RRFIA).
Ever check out the list prices of brand-new main line diesel-electric locomotives? They are expensive, about $3 million each. Are you mesmerized by the horsepower quoted? Nah! You want tractive effort. Hauling heavy, long freight trains is the North American business model. You need to purchase tractive effort.
The presidents of MTA Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) and MTA Metro-North Railroad have announced that Positive Train Control (PTC) has been activated on the majority of their tracks, and both railroads remain on pace to complete system-wide activation of PTC by the end of 2020 as required under a Federal legislation.
Based on data collected from over five years of short line Safety Culture Assessments conducted, the Short Line Safety Institute (SLSI) has developed and released a new resource for short line railroads, entitled Strong Safety Culture Best Practices. This first-of-its-kind guide is available to all short line railroads.
American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Senior Director, Petrochemicals, Transportation and Infrastructure Rob Benedict talks with Railway Age Editor-in-Chief William C. Vantuono about safety, regulatory and legislative matters involving AFPM member companies and
OK, I’ll give you one guess as to who said this. Hints: It’s not APTA or the Eno Center for Transportation. It’s not one of the giant public transportation agencies like the New York MTA or NJ Transit or CTA or WMATA or Los Angeles Metro. It’s not one of the huge engineering consulting firms like WSP USA, AECOM or Parsons. It’s not a transit car builder like Alstom, Siemens or Bombardier. It’s not even Contributing Editor David Peter Alan, whose passion for rail transit has generated tens of thousands of words for the Railway Age website. Give up?
Hard-to-detect braking system defects have rendered Canada’s aging fleet of grain hoppers a safety hazard, says a former director of derailment investigations for the country’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB), the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. NTSB. Ian Naish, who retired from the TSB in 2009, in a CBC interview posted May 15, declared, “The grain car fleet overall is quite defective.”
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) first-quarter 2020 update on railroads’ self-reported progress on fully implementing Positive Train Control (PTC) by the Dec. 31, 2020 deadline shows that, as of March 31, 2020, the job is 98% complete. Nearly all railroads subject to the statutory mandate are operating their systems in revenue service or in advanced field testing, known as revenue service demonstration (RSD), with PTC technology remaining to be activated on only approximately 1,100 required route-miles.
