The hearts of everyone in the railroad industry and who cares about passenger trains are heavy with the losses suffered in last week’s tragedy in Philadelphia. I started writing this from aboard an Acela Express traveling from Boston to New York on Friday. I was headed to Philadelphia for my cousin’s law school graduation, using the New Jersey Transit Northeast Corridor Line to SEPTA West Trenton Line bridge that had been set up to bypass the site of the derailment. I had been scheduled to travel from my home in Washington, DC to Boston on the overnight Northeast Regional train 66 last Tuesday, but it was the first northbound departure to be canceled after the derailment, about which other waiting passengers and I found out from our smartphones in the boarding area. I am very thankful that neither I nor any of my family or friends was aboard train 188, and my thoughts are with the families of those who were and did not make it, and with those who suffered injuries.
It is also because of this conviction that I, like most passenger advocates, have been frustrated watching how the tragedy seems to have reinforced, rather than bridged, the same old partisan divide over how — and in some cases, whether — to improve our passenger train system. It has been made clear, at least preliminarily, that the derailment would have been prevented if some type of speed enforcement technology has been in place on the section of the Northeast Corridor around the Frankford Junction curve. Such a system would have taken over and applied the brakes when the engineer began to accelerate heading into the curve. This technology has existed in some form since the 1920s, but a number of hurdles have prevented its deployment throughout the US railroad network, including cost, time, and the availability of the over-the-air broadcasting spectrum that these communications systems require.
It seems clear that Amtrak’s Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System (ACSES), a version of Positive Train Control (PTC), was not active over that portion of the Corridor. ACSES might have been in place over the entire NEC by now, had Amtrak not encountered a number of legal obstacles to acquiring the necessary spectrum or faced difficulties funding the project from its perennially inadequate budget. On the other hand, Amtrak had the entire 32 years between its 1976 takeover of the entire NEC and Congress’s 2008 PTC mandate to install some form of Automatic Train Control on the NEC in conjunction with cab signaling and Automatic Train Stop, yet none was installed. There are likely a number of reasons for this having to do with funding as well as Amtrak’s institutional inertia and the difficult political dynamic under which it operates.
Congress’s requirement that all railroad lines carrying passengers or toxic by inhalation materials have PTC installed by the end of this year (included in the 2008 Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act), while well-intentioned, had three flaws that prevented railroads from meeting the deadline. First, it is an unfunded mandate on the railroads. Amtrak and commuter rail agencies, none of which are flush with cash, must take funds away from other capital projects in order to comply with the law. Second, the time frame was likely too ambitious, given the legal obstacles to acquiring not only broadcasting bandwidth, but also the land on which to erect transmitting towers. Third, there are a number of less advanced speed and stop enforcement systems than PTC that could nevertheless have saved lives and probably cost less to install.
I firmly believe that investing in passenger rail, and in infrastructure in general, is and should be a non-partisan issue on which people from all over the political spectrum can, and do, agree. Indeed, while my personal views are left of center, I know and work together with dozens of conservatives with whom I agree over 80% on passenger rail issues. And I share many conservative advocates’ desire to see the barriers to competition from operators other than Amtrak reduced and to bring about more opportunities for public-private partnerships.
That being said, it disappoints me that such a clear partisan fault line over assigning responsibility for making our trains safer has emerged in the wake of the wreck. I am worried that this rancor will make both parties even less inclined to cooperate to do what must be done to shore up our nation’s infrastructure — with passenger trains as a key part thereof. However, the derailment has focused more public attention on passenger rail issues in general than I have ever witnessed. Under greater scrutiny from constituents, perhaps lawmakers will feel pressured to take prudent action.
Finally, money is far from the only thing necessary to make meaningful improvements to American passenger train service, and increasing funding levels alone will not automatically make train travel safer and more convenient for more Americans. That said, I still believe that problems with Amtrak's management and institutional culture (which may or may not have played a role in this derailment) are in large part due to the starvation budget the railroad has been on since its inception. An effective organization cannot be run without the ability to do multi-year planning or to invest in system expansion. Perhaps the lack of funding and Amtrak's institutional problems are two sides of the same illness that keep reinforcing each other, an illness that neither party in Congress has been able to cure in spite of numerous attempts to “reform” Amtrak.
Nobody should die as a railroad passenger, and Americans deserve to have the safe, reliable option of train travel to most destinations that citizens of other developed countries enjoy. Those countries’ citizens benefit from this travel choice because putting the necessary funds and political capital into passenger rail is not a matter of controversy amongst their elected officials. I only wish I could say the same for the USA.
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