More on the Great PTC Train Wreck

Last week I wrote about the problem that has brought a big piece of the costly process of installing Positive Train Control (PTC being collision-avoidance technology) on 60,000 miles of railroad to a grinding halt. That problem is the conflict between the mandated deadline of completing PTC by the end of 2015 and an obscure section of the National Historic Preservation Act requiring that no radio installation license be granted by the Federal Communications Commission until Indian nations have inspected the site to ascertain that no ancient artifacts are disturbed or destroyed by the work. For six months now, on orders of the FCC, no installation work has been done on approximately 20,000 wayside poles that will hold radios relaying PTC data to central computers. Go here to read that blog.

Today I’m back with some fresh information. I spoke with someone in the railroad industry very well versed on what is happening. In exchange for talking frankly with me, he asked that his name not be used, and I agreed. I asked him just three questions:

1. How big a problem is this? “A big one. The FCC said both it and the tribes lacked the resources to inspect 20,000 locations quickly and therefore to stop installing radio poles. The commission settled on submitting a ‘program comment’ to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation that will set out a new procedure. If the advisory council votes to adopt the program comment, it becomes the new procedure. The railroads are advocating a lot of exclusion from the inspection provisions based on locations; a lot of poles will go up that affect nothing and nobody. A handful of poles will be on sites of interest. The FCC made statements that they were considering what we asked for. The advisory council in July said it was prepared to vote before the end of 2013 and it has a meeting scheduled in December. But the FCC said it couldn’t write a program comment by then and said it wouldn’t be ready to submit one until the end of next March, when the council next meets.”

2. Six months have passed. Why is this taking so long to resolve? “I really don’t know. The federal government shutdown didn’t help. Yet the FCC has talked about submitting program comments since July. Tribal outreach is a component of that process, which took time. And it took a long time for the FCC to write a ‘scoping letter’ [that describes the problem and the procedure for addressing it] and get the scoping documents out. Plus, there was a period for public comment that just ended.”

3. What’s the outlook going forward? “The FCC thinks it can establish a process by the end of March, as I said. Depending upon the process that is adopted, railroads will then need to figure out how to work with it. The FCC thinks it cannot impose timelines or deadlines on tribes. There’s no guarantee that tribes will respond in a timely fashion.

“There were a host of other issues that made the 2015 deadline imposed by Congress impossible, but this affair certainly makes it worse. No Class I railroad can meet a 2015 deadline, in my opinion.”—Fred W. Frailey