In the first hours after the Amtrak crash outside Philadelphia on May 12, 2015, some people looked to blame Congress for failing to fund critical infrastructure improvements. But the talking points changed when the nation learned the engineer was speeding.
“Breaking tonight, 106 miles per hour,” Megyn Kelly opened her May 13 Fox News show. “That is how fast the NTSB says an Amtrak train was traveling just moments before flying off the rails in Philadelphia last night. And while some of the wounded are still being treated and other passengers are still unaccounted for, there has been a predictable but no less despicable rush to turn this crash into a political talking point.”
Kelly then played a montage of Democrats and one Oklahoma Republican mayor saying the crash was a wake-up call to invest in infrastructure. Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., said, “Last night we failed them. We failed to invest in their safety.”
Kelly said this blaming of “stingy Republicans” poured out before the fact was known that the train was more than two-times over the speed limit as it entered a curve. While a technology called positive train control (PTC) could have slowed the train in the case of human error, its absence in the Philadelphia crash, Kelly said, had nothing to do with Congress refusing to allocate money.
“Congress had already mandated that it be installed, and it’s being installed on all these tracks,” Kelly said. “They hadn’t gotten to this particular track yet. And according to our information, that wasn’t driven by a lack of funding. It just takes a while. They just passed it in the recent past. So they were working on it. So it’s not a failure of infrastructure. It’s a failure of an engineer to obey the speed limit.”
The National Transportation Safety Board is continuing to investigate the reason behind the crash. But we wanted to dig into her claim about the lack of positive train control on that section of rail — and whether congressional funding was an issue.
What we found is that yes, Amtrak and Congress have been working for years to implement positive train control. And yes, the braking system — which National Transportation Safety Board member Robert Sumwalt said would have prevented the crash — is on schedule to be installed by the end of the year. But money from Congress could have pushed up that timetable, specifically when it comes to purchasing radio frequencies necessary for the braking program to work.
The braking system and and the Amtrak crash
Positive train control is a system that uses transponders on the tracks to communicate with controls on a passing locomotive. If the train is moving too fast, the system slows it down. Amtrak released a statement after the Philadelphia crash saying that “installation is largely complete south of Newark, N.J., but the system is only in service on 50 miles of the 226-mile route between Washington and New York.”
The statement said Amtrak is on schedule to have the system fully operational on the Northeast Corridor by the end of 2015. That, Amtrak said, will meet a deadline set by Congress in 2008.
Put another way, the hardware for the new braking system was largely in place (though not specifically at the site of the crash). What was left was the final work to connect it to the trains and activate the system.
PTC installation and funding
The core of Kelly’s claim is that the installation of the PTC braking system was not about funding. To back that up, Fox News sent us a Reuters article about delays in implementing PTC nationwide.
“Federal rules require the national rail network to have an operating PTC system by the end of the year, though many lawmakers have endorsed rail industry appeals for more time to comply,” the article said. “In March, the Senate Commerce Committee voted to extend the deadline for implementing PTC until at least 2020. Both Republicans and Democrats supported the measure, which will now go to the Senate floor.”
That extension, however, served the needs of the freight and commuter rail companies who were unable to get their systems up and running by the end of 2015. Amtrak was a different story.
David Hughes was Amtrak’s chief engineer until 2005 and now consults in the railroad industry. “Amtrak may be the only major railroad to meet the original 2015 deadline,” Hughes told PunditFact.
Amtrak’s specific system is called the Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System. A heavy duty plastic transponder tied to a cross-tie in the track sends speed and location information to the locomotive, which in turn radios that data to a ground control station. If something is going wrong, the ground control station sends a command via radio back to the locomotive, forcing it to slow down.
Amtrak had this system fully operational north of New York City, and was close to putting it online in the section between New York City and Washington, D.C.
The question is, would money have advanced the timeline?
Karl Witbeck is consulting engineer with the Stantec firm. “No doubt the lack of capital funding has paid a large role in the delay of finishing the implementation of PTC for Amtrak,” Witbeck said.
Witbeck studied a key link in the warning system, the radio communications needed to connect the ground control station with the trains. Witbeck, along with the Federal Railroad Administration and Amtrak’s Office of Inspector General, highlighted the lack of accessible, available radio frequencies as the single greatest barrier to completing the automatic braking system for all railroads, not just Amtrak.
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