Sen. Richard Blumenthal is urging the Federal Railroad Administration to enforce the Congress-mandated December 31 deadline for installing Positive Train Control technology — a deadline the vast majority of railroads will not meet.
At a Capitol Hill hearing on passenger railroad safety, the senator pressured Robert Lauby, the chief safety officer of the U.S. Department of Transportation, to fine railroads that fail to install the crash prevention technology — PTC — by the end of the year.
Lauby answered that the FRA will ensure “compliance as soon as possible.” But Blumenthal wasn’t satisfied, saying that the FRA “has been as much part of the problem as the solution.”
“I would be dumbfounded and outraged if I were a rider listening to this conversation,” he said. “Enforcement is about expectations. Right now the expectation is that this law will not be enforced.”
In March, a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation to extend the PTC deadline to 2020. Blumenthal’s competing “Railroad Safety Act” would permit six-month extensions of the December 31 deadline on a case-by-case basis until 2018.
But Blumenthal said it is up to Congress and the FRA to enforce the December 31 deadline, calling their inadequacies so far “a failure of will.”
The call to action comes just weeks after an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia while turning a corner at 56 mph over the speed limit, killing eight and injuring over 200. The derailment could have been prevented by PTC, which is designed to automatically stop a speeding train before such accidents occur.