The Federal Railroad Administration is making available the remaining $46.3 million of $250 million in Positive Train Control (PTC) Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) Program grant money. FRA on Sept. 12 issued a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), to solicit applications.
The House Transportation and Infrastructure Railroad Subcommittee has scheduled yet another pointless, time-consuming “status review” hearing on PTC. The people actually doing the implementation work—railroads, suppliers, consultants, FRA—get to spend another day getting peppered with pointless questions from clueless politicians who obviously don’t bother reading reports or doing basic research, and delight in wasting valuable people’s valuable time to prop up their huge egos and give the appearance of actually doing something useful.
If the new Amtrak management team is sincerely trying to improve safety, we ought to all support what they are doing. But if Amtrak is only using safety as a stalking horse to pursue another agenda (such as discontinuing L-D trains, as is believed in many circles), it should be called out on it.
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has awarded more than $200 million in funds to assist with the deployment of Positive Train Control (PTC), with a second solicitation expected soon for a remaining $46 million. As well, the agency released its second-quarter 2018 PTC progress report, which shows “significant improvement.”
The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) provided a second-quarter 2018 update to progress the commuter rail industry has made toward implementing Positive Train Control (PTC).
It’s going to take a while for New Jersey Transit to dig itself out of the oversize trench that oversize-ego, oversize-mouthed “Bridgegate” Chris Christie gleefully dug for it during his eight interminably long, interminably loud and intrinsically corrupt years as governor of the Garden State. Meanwhile, NJT customers are enduring the effects of Christie’s transportation starvation diet—a locomotive engineer shortage, cancelled commuter trains, and a PTC implementation program that’s behind schedule.
BNSF announced in December 2017 that it had fully installed and was operating under Positive Train Control (PTC) on all mandated subdivisions in advance of the Dec. 31, 2018 interim federal deadline. However, on June 13, it submitted a request to the Federal Railroad Administration for an alternative schedule, a two-year extension to Dec. 31, 2020, because “full implementation status cannot be achieved until all non-BNSF trains and/or equipment operating on its PTC-equipped lines are also PTC-compliant.”
Amtrak, working with BNSF, will the week of June 11 implement Positive Train Control (PTC) on BNSF-owned subdivisions that host the Southwest Chief and California Zephyr, marking the first activation on host-owned territory used by Amtrak. Full PTC activation on BNSF routes that host these two long-distance trains is expected by the end of August.
OMAHA, MAY 21, RSSI PTC SEMINAR – U.S. Class I railroads have made significant progress implementing Positive Train Control, to the extent that all the requirements for the Dec. 31, 2018 interim deadline will be met, making them eligible to apply, if needed, for an extension to Dec. 31, 2020 to complete their systems.
There is a nexus of old and new processes where digital transformation, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and the business of railroading all intersect. The federal mandate for Positive Train Control (PTC) perfectly encapsulates this new reality. If you are in the rail business, your organization has already allocated some level of investment in PTC, but how does that investment of financial and human capital fit into your overall business architecture? How are you going to ensure that you do not just implement another siloed system?