Untangling the tale of PTC

Norfolk Southern's Wick Moorman responds to Railway Age’s October 2015 issue cover story on Positive Train Control.

I read the recent Railway Age article “The Tangled Tale of PTC” (RA, October 2015, p. 20) with a combination of astonishment, disbelief, and irritation.

The essential thesis is that PTC is wildly more expensive and complex than it needs to be due to a combination of hands-off, vision-free, short-term-oriented CEOs, and railroad signal departments more focused on guarding their turf than advancing the best interests of their respective companies.

According to the contributors, this combination of at-best inept railroad managers has completely missed all of the great benefits that PTC can deliver while allowing the project to be horribly mismanaged.

I worked in Norfolk Southern’s transportation planning group when we studied what were then ATCS and ARES.Later, I was head of NS’s information technology and strategic planning functions, and finally the CEO from 2005 until 2015. I have a long experience looking at the concept of PTC, with all of its potential benefits and costs, and I can state with complete assurance that the arguments presented in the article are completely misguided and just plain wrong. The vast majority of people in the industry would agree.

The first argument offered in the article is that the railroads lack the vision to see and capitalize on the potential business benefits of PTC. These alleged benefits, which are termed as “strategic,” focus around the possibility of implementing moving-block systems and the availability of continuous real-time information from train operations.

There is some benefit from better and more real-time operations—for example, enhanced opportunities to improve pacing in our onboard management systems—but the savings opportunities are relatively small, and we can get most of that today by merely installing GPS and wireless capabilities on our locomotives, a much cheaper option than PTC.

Most of the ire in the article is directed at the supposedly lost opportunity to implement a moving-block system, thereby allowing for abandonment of the current signal systems and increased line capacity. What the article’s contributors fail to mention is that the FRA regulations governing implementation actually require that PTC systems be integrated with existing signal systems for lines with speeds greater than 49 MPH.

These same regs also require broken rail protection for such lines, and the track circuit technology that underlays today’s signal systems is still the only reliable method of providing that protection. Even assuming that alternative broken rail protection becomes viable, the FRA requirements—and the added software complexity to implement a true moving-block system—would take additional years to develop and implement.

Even if technically possible, the arguments for moving-block are overstated. The vast majority of the U.S. rail network mileage is not at capacity, and those areas that are at capacity can be addressed effectively through other means at far less cost. This was a conclusion we reached at NS more than 20 years ago, and the math still works today.

The second recurring theme in the article is that the CEO’s did not “bother” to familiarize themselves with the capabilities of PTC and thereby see all its possibilities—a so-called “leadership mistake.” Because of that, they turned the project over to “technicians” with no charge to execute the project as efficiently as possible.

The clear inference is that the Class I CEOs did not take the time to understand the implications of the single-biggest capital project in our careers and that we handed the project off to others with no oversight or accountability. Not true by a long shot.

Using Jim Young as an example of someone who “compromised the principles of strategic leadership” was particularly offensive. Jim was a terrific person and a great CEO, and I know from many conversations with him that he fully understood what PTC could and would do on the Union Pacific.

At Norfolk Southern, the PTC oversight committee was as high-level as possible. It included myself, Mark Manion, our COO, and Deb Butler, our CIO and EVP Strategic Planning.

We held monthly meetings with the project team, reviewing technical issues, coordination issues with the other carriers, and all-too-often the issues dealing with the FRA, which have presented and continue to represent additional costs and delays for all of the carriers. The NS team was keenly aware of the need to control costs and realize any benefits possible, and I have no doubt that was the case for all railroads.

Another idea presented is that the railroads have made a major mistake in not having a systems integrator. But this ignores the remarkable achievements of the seven U.S. major carriers to come together and develop solutions for what is a remarkably complex system of systems. Working together, our teams have acquired the necessary bandwidth for our communications requirements, fostered the development of new radio technology that is essential for the system to function effectively, and developed common standards for interoperability.

The bottom-line issue is the complexity of PTC. Much of the essential technology, particular in communications infrastructure such as Wi-Fi and cellular networks, along with adequate processing capability at a reasonable cost, didn’t even exist when PTC was first conceptualized. And we’re still developing some of that technology today. It is this sheer technological complexity that is possibly the single-biggest concern in terms of the potential impact on reliability, quite separate from and far more fundamental than a “lack” of a systems integrator.

With PTC we are assembling a system of systems, all of which have to function with close to six-sigma reliability for the entire system to operate at the current railroads’ levels. Not only are these systems highly complex, many of them are going to be operating in one of the most hostile industrial environments—a moving diesel-electric locomotive. While we are all working feverishly to build reliability into every system and will rigorously test PTC, the possibility of disruptions as PTC is implemented is a very real one.

PTC was an unfunded mandate forced upon the industry in 2008 following a tragic accident caused by human failure, and is the best example you will ever find of a well-intentioned terrible piece of legislation. It was an idea promoted by a handful of “experts” based on three flawed premises: That it wouldn’t be that expensive; that the technology was mature; and that it wouldn’t be that hard to install.

Now, seven years and billions of dollars into the project with billions more to go, we have clearly seen just how wrong these “experts” were.

Moorman is the former Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Norfolk Southern Corp.