• PTC

ASLRRA, Wabtec offer cloud PTC solution

Written by Railway Age Staff
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The American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association has entered into an agreement with Wabtec Railway Electronics, Inc. to provide Positive Train Control (PTC) support to its members via the Wabtec Cloud Multi-Tenant Back Office (MTBO) solution.

The Wabtec Cloud-hosted solution offers complete PTC back-office functionality offering cost-effective and efficient operations for short line tenant railroads, including those railroads with multiple Standard Carrier Accounting Codes (SCACs).

“The implementation of PTC is one of the most complex and challenging projects to be mandated for the U.S. rail system, particularly for our short line members, who often do not have the technical staff and expertise, but have a complicated role to play, integrating with multiple Class I systems,” said Judy Petry, President, Farmrail System, Inc. and Chair of ASLRRA. “Via our agreement with Wabtec, ASLRRA can offer PTC back-office support at a price that is more reasonable for our small business railroad members, particularly those with multiple railroad entities.”

The service will enable real-time information regarding train movement, speed restrictions, train position and speed, and the state of signal and switch devices to be shared between trains, rail wayside devices, and back-office applications. Moreover, the hosted service will reduce the risk of deploying multiple railroads by co-locating the message infrastructure into a single piece of software. This will reduce the hardware and software complexity, and lower the costs of implementation.

“We understand the complexities and the hurdles of PTC implementation, which is particularly acute for short line and regional railroads,” said Rajendra Jadhav, President of Wabtec’s Electronics group. “Our MTBO solution will enable ASLRRA members to reduce the risk, and the costs in testing and deploying an overall PTC system across multiple railroads.”

The Wabtec solution joins the suite of support options offered by ASLRRA to its members to enable efficient and cost-effective implementation of the PTC mandate, including a PTC back-office solution from Herzog, grant writing expertise supplied by Bergmann, HDR Inc., and R.L. Banks and Associates, and PTC Safety Documentation development provided by Rockwell Collins. For more information, contact Jo Strang, ([email protected]) or Mike Ogborn ([email protected]).

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