House Hearing on PTC Deployment

This morning the Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials Subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee held a hearing on “The State of Positive Train Control Implementation in the United States”. I was not able to provide advance notice because the hearing was not listed on the Congress.gov website (the House site I normally monitor for hearing information) until after the hearing had started.

The witnesses were an interesting mix of government and industry representatives:

∙ Ms. Sarah Feinberg, FRA;

∙ Mr. Russell Kerwin, Metrolink/AECOM;

∙ Mr. Frank Lonegro, CSX Transportation;

∙ Mr. Charles Mathias, FCC; and

∙ Mr. Donald Orseno, Metra Commuter Railroad

The PTC system is required by law to be installed and operable on all tracks where passenger rail operates and on Class I rail lines that are used to transport toxic inhalation (TIH) chemicals. The deadline for installation, again by law, is December 31, 2015. Some of the passenger railroads have mainly completed their PTC installations and most will apparently have their installations complete by the deadline, though the individual systems may not be approved by the FRA by that time. The freight railroads will not, however, be anywhere near meeting that deadline.

Two interesting comments about the problem can be found in the written testimony from the FRA and CSX:

FRA (pg 2) – “FRA reserves the right to use any and all enforcement tools from civil penalties to emergency orders, to require the railroads to make progress on PTC implementation to ensure public safety prior to January 1, 2016.”

CSX (pg 8) – “Operating certain trains on nonPTC-compliant tracks could be an unacceptable choice for some railroads, and the impact of railroads’ decisions on commuters and industries that rely on rail service could have significant effects that have not yet been fully examined.”

FRA is stuck. The December deadline was set by Congress and they are required to enforce the deadline. They have yet to come up with their detailed enforcement plan, but at some point in the process (CSX does not expect to have their PTC plan fully deployed until 2020) there will be imposition of some really significant fines (eg: up to $25,000/day for each line segment where PTC is not deployed).

The freight railroads may have to make a decision if they are willing to continue to allow passenger railroads to operate on their lines where PTC is not functioning. The potential liability for an accident on a line that is legally deficient in safety makes the lawyers and bankers for the railroads extremely nervous.

The issue for the transportation of TIH chemicals on lines where PTC is not yet functioning has the same issue. It is even made worse because the railroads have frequently made public their concern about their potential liability for transporting these chemicals without the PTC concerns. It is very likely that railroads will refuse to transport these chemicals on lines that do not have approved PTC deployments.

The ‘easy solution’ to the problem is for Congress to extend the deadline. There would certainly be a great deal of opposition to such an extension from the safety community. There is currently a bill on the Senate side of the hill, S 650, that is awaiting floor action in that body. There is currently no bill being considered in the House. I expect that that will change as a result of this hearing.

S 650 Introduced – PTC Extension

As I noted in an earlier blog posting Sen. Blunt (R,MO) introduced S 650, the Railroad Safety and Positive Train Control Extension Act. The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee held a markup hearing on the bill this week and recommended the bill favorably after amending it. The bill would extend various deadlines for the implementation of positive train control (PTC) technology on railroads.

Background

Congress required in 49 USC 20157 that all Class 1 railroads install a PTC system by December 31, 2015 on all rail lines over which toxic inhalation hazard (TIH) chemicals are transported. In implementing that requirement the Secretary of Transportation {49 CFR 236.1005} extended that requirement to all railroads that operated passenger rail lines on the same tracks over which TIH chemicals were transported.

There have been a number of challenges in meeting that deadline; both technical and regulatory. One of the problems that the railroads had was getting regulatory approval from the FCC for installing the track-side communications antennas. The FCC had originally required that each antenna installation undergo a separate permitting process, including a required historical commission review. That process was ultimately streamlined, but only after significant delays.

Wholesale Deadline Extension

Section 2 of the bill makes two changes to 49 USC 20157. The first extends the current deadline until December 31^st, 2020 {§2(b)(1) to §20157(a)(1)}. The second would change the date basis for determining which sections of rail line would be required to have PTC installations; requiring PTC installation on lines over which TIH chemicals are transported on or after December 31^st, 2015 {§2(b)(2) to §20157(a)(1)(B)}.

Retail Deadline Extension

Section 3 of the bill would also allow the Secretary of Transportation to authorize one year extensions to the implementation deadline on a case by case basis through 2022 {§3(a)(3) adding §20157(i)}. It goes on to outline the process by which the railroad would request the extension and the guidelines the Secretary would use in approving the extension. It provides a 10 day approval decision deadline after the Secretary receives the application.

Committee Amendment

The Committee amended the bill by adding a new section 5. This section amends §20157 by adding §20157(a)(3). It would require that each covered railroad would provide detailed annual reports to the Secretary about the progress they were making on the implementation of their PTC systems. The reporting requirement would continue until the Secretary certified the PTC installation under §20157(h).

In an interesting change of Congressional reporting requirements, the amendment did not require a summary report to Congress on the PTC implementation status. Instead it required the Secretary to make each report “available on the website of the Federal Railroad Administration” {§20157(a)(3)(D)}.

Moving Forward

Chairman Thune (R,SD) is obviously making the adoption of S 650 a priority for his Committee. It will be interesting to see how well that translates into moving the bill to the floor of the Senate.

The bill did have bipartisan support in committee. There will be some environmental and safety advocates who can be expected to object to the extension of this deadline. Given the fact that the current deadline cannot be met at this point, I would expect that those objections would take the form of modifying the new deadline date in the amendment process rather than stopping the bill from being considered.

I also expect that there will be an attempt made to add rail lines over which crude oil trains run to the PTC installation requirement. This has included in some other proposed legislation about crude oil trains, but getting that particular amendment added to this bill would probably be easier than getting the other bills through the legislative process. Such an amendment would also make the overall bill more palatable to safety and environmental advocates.

Bills Introduced – 03-04-15

Yesterday there were 146 bills introduced in the House and Senate. Two of those bills may be of specific interest to readers of this blog:

HR 1290 To provide for a study by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies on the impact of diverting certain freight rail traffic to avoid urban areas, and for other purposes. Rep. Ellison, Keith [D-MN-5]

S 650 A bill to extend the positive train control system implementation deadline, and for other purposes. Sen. Blunt, Roy [R-MO]