The Independent View: Amtrak and its Quest for Safety

The Amtrak train that derailed in Philadelphia on Tuesday night was equipped with an automatic speed control system that officials say could have prevented the wreck, which killed eight passengers and injured hundreds. But the system, which was tantalizingly close to being operational, was delayed by budgetary shortfalls, technical hurdles and bureaucratic rules, officials said Thursday.

In 2008, Congress ordered the installation of what are known as Positive Train Control systems (PTC), which can detect an out-of-control, speeding train and automatically slow it down. But because lawmakers failed to provide the railroads access to the wireless frequencies required to make the system work, Amtrak was forced to negotiate for airwaves owned by private companies that are often used in mobile broadband.

The railroad struggled for four years to buy the rights to airwaves in the Northeast Corridor that would have allowed them to turn the system on. “The transponders were on the tracks,” said one person who attended a Thursday morning briefing for congressional staff members. “But they also said they weren’t operational, because of this ongoing spectrum issue.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had approved Amtrak’s application for the purchase of wireless spectrum from an entity called Skybridge Spectrum Foundation on March 5, clearing the way for final tests on the system, a spokeswoman for the commission said.

The crash spotlighted other possible shortcomings in Amtrak’s safety system, officials said. The stretch of track where Train 188 crashed heading north was equipped with an older automatic braking system, but only on the southbound side, an official briefed on the investigation said. Some senior Amtrak officials did not become aware that the braking system had not been installed on the northbound side until after the train derailed.

A spokeswoman for the railroad said Thursday that the decision not to install the system on the northbound stretch of track had been made in the 1990s and reflected the maximum allowable speeds in each direction. Trains approaching Philadelphia from New York can travel as fast as 110 miles per hour, Amtrak said, and face a steeper decrease in allowable speed heading into the curve than trains traveling from Philadelphia toward New York.

In addition, Train 188 was equipped with a second safety system designed to ring buzzers and bells in the engine’s cabin if the engineer does not touch the steering panel for a short period, people briefed on the investigation said. The system, which is intended to prevent crashes when engineers doze off or become distracted, is supposed to stop the train automatically if the engineer does not touch the steering panel after the alarms have sounded.

But officials did not explain in the congressional briefing whether the buzzers were operational on Train No. 188 or why they would not have stopped the train before the accident, according to two people who attended.

But this does not explain why the train first increased speeds from 70 to 106, before the breaks were applied, and why the train was going 102 at the time of the derailment.

The FCC also defended its handling of Amtrak’s petition to acquire wireless frequencies, asserting that it had taken Amtrak three years to negotiate the purchase and that the commission had approved the deal within days.

Money has also been an issue in implementing positive train control.

The Federal Railroad Administration has calculated the cost of the system at $52,000 per mile of track. The railroads have put a total price tag of more than $9 billion on the system and said they have spent $5.2 billion so far. One of the biggest problems is that the system needs to be interoperable, meaning that communication is necessary between equipment used by different railroads, even if the railroads use different types of equipment.

The Federal Railroad Administration twice sought extra funding from Congress to finance the technology for Amtrak and other commuter rails. A first request for $825 million was ignored. A second request for extra funding was made this year for the 2016 budget as part of the Department of Transportation’s Grow America budget.

“Clearly, one of the hurdles that Amtrak has and the commuter rail industry has is that this is very expensive technology,” Joseph C. Szabo, a former administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, said. “It was never funded. The failure to invest in Amtrak’s capital program clearly has been a hindrance in more timely deployment. The way to make public rail a priority would be with public funding.”