Chicago’s Metra installing high-tech system to prevent collisions

Written by jrood

Metra plans to spend $100 million to install a high-tech system that would keep trains from colliding or prevent a distracted engineer from speeding through a warning signal to slow down or stop, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Such a safety system would
have overridden the engineer’s error that caused the September 2005 derailment
of a Metra train, killing two women and injuring 117 others on Chicago’s South
Side, federal officials said.

The technology, they say,
also could have prevented a 2008 commuter-freight train collision in Los
Angeles that killed 25 people. The Metrolink commuter train’s engineer was
text-messaging when he ran a red signal and the train collided with a freight
train at a combined speed of more than 80 m.p.h. That crash prompted Congress a
month later to pass a law requiring large railroads to install the system,
known as positive train control, or PTC, by 2015.

PTC is a complex system of
computers, GPS devices, radios and other communications equipment intended to
take over when a train is approaching another train. In an emergency, the
system also could override an engineer who may be distracted or otherwise miss
or ignore a warning signal to slow down, such as when a train crosses a switch
or a track crossover, or when it exceeds the speed limit.

Metra officials said Friday
that they expect to have the system running sooner than 2015.

"I think we’re ahead
of the curve," Metra Executive Director Phil Pagano said.

Critics say, however, that
rail lines should have installed such systems long ago. The National
Transportation Safety Board called for positive train control as far back as
1990.

The NTSB cited the lack of
such a system in the deadly crash on Metra’s Rock Island line in 2005, the
second such derailment on the same line. In December 2006, the safety agency
issued an urgent recommendation to Metra to install an automatic system to warn
engineers.

Metra began installing the
similar, but less-advanced, Electronic Train Management System on the Rock
Island line. That system will be replaced by PTC, officials said.

The $100 million to pay for
the PTC system will come from the state’s capital program, officials said.

Installing PTC throughout
the Chicago area faces enormous technical challenges, officials said. "We
have the most complicated freight/commuter system in the United States,"
Pagano said.

Each day, the region
handles more than 1,300 trains, 800 passenger and 500 freight. Six of the
continent’s seven largest railroads operate here.

"Everybody’s
locomotives need to work with each other," said Bill Tupper, Metra’s
director of operations.

BNSF got federal approval
to install the high-tech system in its locomotives in January 2007.

Amtrak has spent $20 million
over the last 10 years installing PTC on its high-speed rail line from Porter,
Ind., to Kalamazoo, Mich., spokesman Marc Magliari said.

The "next
generation" of PTC holds the potential for stopping trains when a school
bus is halted on railroad tracks, Pagano said.

Seven students died and 24
were injured on Oct. 25, 1995, when a Metra train struck their school bus at
Algonquin Road near U.S. Highway 14 in Fox River Grove.

"We know that the
technology is there" to one day improve the system, Pagano said.

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