>"Railroads are under government orders to install positive train control by the end of 2018 after the industry lobbied Congress to extend earlier deadlines, citing complexity and cost"
Amtrak receives well over a billion dollars a year in subsidies from the US Federal government[1], they should not be allowed to use cost as an excuse for not modernizing safety.
Also I think if you sight safety as being too complex then maybe you have no business operating a monopoly passenger rail service. Lawmakers are just as much to blame for this tragedy as the incompetence and disregard at Amtrak.
My understanding is that many modern Amtrak locomotives are equipped with PTC. Either way, the problem was that the track was not yet equipped with the necessary transmitters to communicate with the train (and isn't yet mandated to, since the railroad industry keeps lobbying to move the implementation date forward).
In Amtrak's defense, my understanding is that this track was actually owned by WSDOT / Sound Transit. And the mainline track (privately) owned by Union Pacific / BNSF isn't any better. Amtrak owns very little track of it's own on the west coast.
The failure to deploy PTC is a systemic issue with the entire railroad industry.
In Poland we still have the relatively medieval central radio and lights or semaphore system, tiered with rules to override it via radio plus really dumb automated braking system with train central detector, also enforcing speed limits in more advanced versions.
Plain old local moving block systems are widespread but US does not mandate them.
These are all mandatory (esp. the wired one where light or semaphore control is tied to NTC and/or PTC)
And the system is really dumb and electrical, not electronic. It is considered one of Automatic Train Protection systems. (The Polish short is SHP, translated as Automated Train Braking. The other system is Radio-Stop, a dumb radio alert system of local range triggered mostly manually forcing braking of all cabs in range.)
Similar slightly more modern systems are still used throughout Europe. The fact they are dumb (train is only slightly smarter) makes them cheap to deploy. They are mostly supervised or not automated other than the moving block light signal. (Which is often local and can be overridden at low speed only after radio confirmation.)
SHP is placed before speed limits and stations to alert the conductor. And if you pass the second one while the first is not cleared it means the train is runway and automated breaking is applied. The "logic" is in the train.
Compared to this Amtrak style PTC needs a big central computer system and control lines plus a train with an impressive array of sensors with remote data. Similar to ERTMS class 3.
US used to have legacy inductive systems in place, but for dumb cost saving reasons the companies were allowed to nor install them anymore.
What I understand, which has at least been consistent with my experience riding many routes in most regions of the country, is that Amtrak is hindered by having to yield to freight, which takes priority in the US.
It's very rare to take Amtrak and not spend what can often be many consecutive hours waiting at a junction for a freight train to pass. Of course freight and passenger trains travel at very different speeds so the problem has no solution that even billions of dollars can solve, and it's only compounded by the vast distances of single-lane track in the US, which serve the purposes of freight needs just fine.
The difference in operation and overhead requirements for each use cannot be overstated. Besides a few routes in the Northeast and the Socal coastline, traveling by Amtrack is a novelty or a mistake. Competing with airlines on any route is far from realistic. I used to take this train between Portland and Seattle before it was beat by a <$20 twice-a-day bus program with good marketing and free wi-fi, relegating the train to being only a bit more comfortable and about $60 more expensive (and now more scary). I've been on >10 hour Amtrak rides which had no more than 2 people per car! When you run a route once every few days, you can't just shift people around like the airlines do. Without the subsidies, Amtrak simply doesn't exist.
> It's very rare to take Amtrak and not spend what can often be many consecutive hours waiting at a junction for a freight train to pass.
Its true that Amtrak often has to yield to freight on a lot of rail, but saying its “rare” to ride without being stuck for “hours” seems a gross exaggeration, or at least starkly different from my own rides. (Up and down west coast, northeast corridor, a couple times across the middle - highly recommended if you have a few days to spare).
Usually it’s 5 minutes of waiting, and for me I don’t recall ever more than 20.
Riding across the entire country (Oakland -> Philadelphia) I probably accrued 30 minutes of waiting.
I think that varies on a rail-by-rail basis. I was chatting on 2 meters the other day with someone who does transport with BNSF on the route this train runs and in that case at least freight yields to passenger trains.
Agreed on all points. In this case is there a (e:) more competent passenger carrier that could step in to replace Amtrak? My understanding of the subsidies is that there would be no passenger service without it. Is it feasible to have competitive rail service in the US, does anyone do it?
Amtrak actually makes a profit [1][2] on both Acela and the slower services in the Northeast Corridor, but not anywhere else.
If we suppose that a privatized passenger carrier would want to make a profit, shedding long-distance trains would be wise, but several Amtrak directors have been against doing so time and time again.
If a private carrier were allowed to take over the northeast regional segment and abandon everything else, it might be feasible. Amtrak runs a profit on this segment, but only because Congress foots the capital expenditures. But maybe a private entity could harness cost efficiencies to make it.
Except the lobbying effort to delay the roll out of PTC was done by the Association of American Railroads[1], of which Amtrak is a full member with much influence.[2]
The deadlines were extended for short term financial considerations. The law makers responsible for it should be named. Unlike the executive branch messing up in Flint and killing people the legislative branch can only be made accountable by the people.
Besides being a tragedy, this is a national embarrassment. It's a fucking train on a track on it's maiden voyage. And they crashed it.
It should not be humanly possible to configure the train to run at 80 mph over a section of track rated for 30 mph. The idea that some people say we need billions of dollars to make this work only compounds the embarrassment.
We want Level 5 self driving cars but we can't control a single variable (velocity) in a 1 dimensional problem space?!
Not even PTC. Conductor awareness system would have caught it. Or automated train protection system like used in Europe. (Not related to PTC such as ERTMS) These are dirt cheap and local to the train so there is no problem with deployment. Some use dirt cheap passive electromagnet beacons but are executed inside the train.
US still has these on two lines. For some unfathomable reason the regulators allowed not installing these.
But I have a feeling that the money sucking industry selling a particular solution called "Positive Train Control" has managed to create some sort of undeployable monstrosity. And what we actually need is something completely different which costs virtually nothing to implement.
I'd guess that until PTC becomes standard across the country, new lines may be deployed with out it. The lack of PTC certainly doesn't stop them from running trains on pre-existing lines today.
I've spent almost the last decade involved with designing and implementing the messaging system behind PTC. Every one of these disasters makes me wish it was deployed everywhere. But for better or worse, railroads are incredibly change and risk intolerant. Everything goes through extensive testing before being rolled out into the field, which can add several years to any rollout plan.
That this is a problem is just ridiculous. It's on freaking rails! There is absolutely no excuse for this. GPS, Inertial Nav, simply integrating speed over time, it should be absolutely dead simple to calculate exactly where the train is at all times.
The article mentioned crap like differential GPS. Completely unnecessary. You don't need to be that accurate, I mean good grief, +/- 100 feet would be just fine for dealing with such gross overspeed detection.
I can't believe this is actually a problem. Pure politics/bureaucracy. It's certainly not a technical problem.
You don't even need GPS, or an external signal at all. All you need is an odometer.
1) Engineer selects the train's starting position (the station and departure gate) and selects the route.
2) Train software presses the equivalent of a 'trip reset' button that our cars have had forever. Current Position = 0.0
3) The train and the engineer each program a maximum speed. The train determines the maximum speed by selecting the maxSpeed which has the highest Position less than currentPosition. The engineer determines the maximum speed as she normally would.
4) The train's speed must not exceed the lower of the two configured maximum speeds.
> probably runs into issues with accumulated error
Typically there's no single nor double integration required for a wheeled ground vehicle; distance (revolutions times wheel circumference) is the primary measurement, with speed being trivially computed from that plus an accurate clock.
overspeed protection has been standard on most national railways for decades
is there any reason they invented a new system (expensive and slow to rollout) vs. using an existing tried and tested one?
the main UK system (there are two) is nothing to write home about, but it is gloriously simple and was very fast and cheap to deploy: two metal transmitters live in the track bed coming up to a hazard, spaced such that they are 1 second apart at the maximum speed
if the train detector passes over both in less than 1 second then the brakes are triggered automatically
PTC is a lot more than overspeed control, imagine any use case that would be enabled by electronically controlled trains connected to a highly available network.
TPWS was always a stopgap (rolled out in the 90s while ETCS was being developed); as I said it was cheap and easy to deploy, and has prevented many accidents exactly like this one for 25 years
ETCS does what you are describing, and has been live in the UK and Europe since the early 00s
it works, and is slowly being rolled out everywhere replacing TPWS
The Pennsylvania Railroad had the equivalent of positive train control on all their mainlines by the late 50s. It's sad that we don't have it everywhere almost 60 years later
Is someone offering to pay? The reason we do not have a Pennsy anymore is that they went bankrupt, partly because they had to compete with subsidized highways and airports (there are various other reasons).
The fact is that PTC is an expensive way to increase the safety of one of the safest ways people can travel. Automobiles are far more dangerous. If the billions of dollars being spent on PTC were instead used to expand passenger service (and take cars off the road) we would almost certainly save more lives.
Also keep in mind that PTC solves just one of many ways that train wrecks can occur. It is not hard to find examples of other recent fatal incidents that PTC would have done nothing to prevent:
> Is someone offering to pay? The reason we do not have a Pennsy anymore is that they went bankrupt, partly because they had to compete with subsidized highways and airports (there are various other reasons).
I would say more than partially. Large portions of their revenue suddenly shifted to use those subsidized highways and airports. Sudden shocks are hard, even for a company doing financially well like the Pennsy was until the last few years.
My point is more that this technology has largely existed for the past 60 years. Even implemented slowly over the last 30 years, that time would have left us with a system that had most of the benefits of PTC.
> The fact is that PTC is an expensive way to increase the safety of one of the safest ways people can travel. Automobiles are far more dangerous. If the billions of dollars being spent on PTC were instead used to expand passenger service (and take cars off the road) we would almost certainly save more lives.
No argument. I hate cars. Car culture is toxic and causes so many problems.
> Also keep in mind that PTC solves just one of many ways that train wrecks can occur. It is not hard to find examples of other recent fatal incidents that PTC would have done nothing to prevent:
Just because a safety feature wouldn't prevent every accident doesn't mean it shouldn't be used. The question is how much of a benefit does it bring?
I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying we should disregard train safety because there are other more dangerous forms of travel?
Travel by rail may be one of the safest methods of travel (citation needed) but the US has much more dangerous rail infrastructure than the rest of the developed world. There doesn't seem to be a good reason for this.
The fatal train crash in this article was on the first run of a newly expanded line. It injured more people than were on the train because it fell on the freeway.
You may be able to cherry pick train crashes that PTC would not have prevented but my understanding is that several recent (last 10 years) fatal crashes would have been prevented by PTC.
Actually, our freight rail system is the best in the world. The problem is there is no money for passenger server because the US is stuck in a car-centric mode of thinking about transportation.
I've worked on two PTC projects, one successful and one failure, after hundreds of millions dollars. The successful one took about 6 years and is still on a trial basis. The failed one had an aggressive schedule but ran out of money after 3 years going nowhere. This thing is not as easy as it seems.
I'm interested in your experience, what makes it so hard? The PTC roll-out is not new but delays seem common, it's obviously hard but why? Once we figure it out in one place can that experience be applied elsewhere easily?
Given the estimate of how long something takes, and dividing it up amongst the people who can do it, and then say... we're going to deliver it in 75% of the optimal time (based on the size of the project - increasing the speed of getting it done by adding people and having a more aggressive schedule)...
Well, for the data set of 20,000 projects there were 750 that were trying to deliver in less than 75% of the optimal time. Of those 750, none were able to be completed in that time.
Granted, that was for software projects. But I suspect that beurocratic projects have similar problems. Need it done faster? Add more people. Have more people? Need more meetings. Have more tasks going on at once? More likely that someone is going to be waiting on another task getting complete because of a bad (overly optimistic) estimate / deadline. Have more people doing nothing at any given time? Spend money faster... and run out of budget all that much faster.
Yeah, this is really weird to me. They're talking about installing sensors on particular tracks and the like, after saying that it's GPS-based, but... why? Stick a GPS on the engine, load a database of maximum speeds, get instant safety. What'm I missing?
(Yeah, you have to integrate with the engines themselves, but that seems like not a 6-year project, and especially not once it's been designed and tested. It probably also won't account for "stop, there's something else on the tracks", but just speed-checking seems like it would be a massive reduction of risk with very little complexity...)
There are a number of reasons, typical of large projects. Scope creep, mismatched of experience/expertise/organization-setup, unrealistic expectation, insufficient funding, complex vendor/system integration, and long testing cycle.
Funding for PTC inevitably is politically motivated. There are petty projects or requirements tacked onto the main project by various stakeholders, in regardless of technical feasibility.
Railroads are usually operation centric companies focusing on day to day operation. Their expertise is not at designing, engineering, or building things. Outside vendors are brought in to bid on the PTC project. Due to high risk and high liability, only a few companies have the financial backing to put up the surety bond to bid on the project. Sometimes there's only one bidder. The competent ones know the high cost and long time to build the thing and decide to stay put. The less competent one misjudges the time and cost, provides the lowest bid, and becomes the general contractor.
Nobody has a complete set of technologies to implement the entire PTC project. The general contractor has the financial mean but not the technologies. Numerous subcontractors bid on various parts of the project to join the party. The selection of these subcontractors and their technologies sometime are political. The general contractor might not like a sub but is forced to take on the sub because of pressure. A working combination might not be transferable to different railroads due to different vendor/technologies winning the bids.
Pretty much all the vendor technologies are proprietary, and integration among them is a nightmare. Some of them sound good on paper and on promise but fall short when the rubber meets the road. In the failure case I cited above, one fortune 500 company acting as a sub provides a critical part which simply cannot be integrated with the rest of the system. It was too late and too expensive to pick another vendor and the project went into limbo due to running out of funding.
The testing cycle is very long. You are retrofitting a busy daily running railroad live, with people's lives at stake.
It’s totally believable. China and Europe both implemented some form of positive train control, largely because much of their passenger traffic runs on relatively new track designed for passenger traffic. In the US, we’ve not built significant passenger rail track in a century. The only part of Amtrak’s network owned by Amtrak is the northeast corridor. Key parts of that infrastructure date to the 1800s (e.g. the tunnel under Baltimore). Everywhere else, Amtrak runs in freight track.
I came in here to vent about how unsafe our rail systems are. However, our deaths per passenger-mile are well below the EU average, and we're safer than all except UK, Denmark, and Netherlands: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jul/25/how-sa...
Still, this wreck is sad, and also embarrassing. Our rail system is just not a meaningful transportation network, and is such a missed opportunity. Even small efforts at improving it seem to end in failure, or even disaster.
Reading transportation fatality statistics requires some nuance.
In the realm of railways, most fatalities tend to be suicides causing no additional deaths, which are often analyzed separately. The EU does this [1], while the Guardian article only raises this distinction halfway through.
Once you exclude suicides, there are several other categories that are useful to distinguish: collisions (e.g. between two trains), derailments, accidents at road-crossings, and 'accidents to persons caused by rolling stock in motion' [2]. The share of accidents by category will tell you a lot about a particular country's issues; a relatively large amount of level crossing accidents may suggest that not enough of the rail network may be grade separated (e.g. Poland, Hungary, Romania), while a high share (and absolute number) of collisions or derailments would be a serious cause for alarm.
Also consider this 2012 post [3] which compares collisions and derailments per usage by country between Europe and the US, originally written as a response to that 2011 article.
Readit News
Amtrak receives well over a billion dollars a year in subsidies from the US Federal government[1], they should not be allowed to use cost as an excuse for not modernizing safety.
Also I think if you sight safety as being too complex then maybe you have no business operating a monopoly passenger rail service. Lawmakers are just as much to blame for this tragedy as the incompetence and disregard at Amtrak.
[1] https://www.cbo.gov/budget-options/2013/44782
In Amtrak's defense, my understanding is that this track was actually owned by WSDOT / Sound Transit. And the mainline track (privately) owned by Union Pacific / BNSF isn't any better. Amtrak owns very little track of it's own on the west coast.
The failure to deploy PTC is a systemic issue with the entire railroad industry.
Plain old local moving block systems are widespread but US does not mandate them. These are all mandatory (esp. the wired one where light or semaphore control is tied to NTC and/or PTC) And the system is really dumb and electrical, not electronic. It is considered one of Automatic Train Protection systems. (The Polish short is SHP, translated as Automated Train Braking. The other system is Radio-Stop, a dumb radio alert system of local range triggered mostly manually forcing braking of all cabs in range.)
Similar slightly more modern systems are still used throughout Europe. The fact they are dumb (train is only slightly smarter) makes them cheap to deploy. They are mostly supervised or not automated other than the moving block light signal. (Which is often local and can be overridden at low speed only after radio confirmation.)
SHP is placed before speed limits and stations to alert the conductor. And if you pass the second one while the first is not cleared it means the train is runway and automated breaking is applied. The "logic" is in the train.
Compared to this Amtrak style PTC needs a big central computer system and control lines plus a train with an impressive array of sensors with remote data. Similar to ERTMS class 3.
US used to have legacy inductive systems in place, but for dumb cost saving reasons the companies were allowed to nor install them anymore.
My problem, not my problem, his problem, not his problem... What a stupid situation...
It's very rare to take Amtrak and not spend what can often be many consecutive hours waiting at a junction for a freight train to pass. Of course freight and passenger trains travel at very different speeds so the problem has no solution that even billions of dollars can solve, and it's only compounded by the vast distances of single-lane track in the US, which serve the purposes of freight needs just fine.
The difference in operation and overhead requirements for each use cannot be overstated. Besides a few routes in the Northeast and the Socal coastline, traveling by Amtrack is a novelty or a mistake. Competing with airlines on any route is far from realistic. I used to take this train between Portland and Seattle before it was beat by a <$20 twice-a-day bus program with good marketing and free wi-fi, relegating the train to being only a bit more comfortable and about $60 more expensive (and now more scary). I've been on >10 hour Amtrak rides which had no more than 2 people per car! When you run a route once every few days, you can't just shift people around like the airlines do. Without the subsidies, Amtrak simply doesn't exist.
Its true that Amtrak often has to yield to freight on a lot of rail, but saying its “rare” to ride without being stuck for “hours” seems a gross exaggeration, or at least starkly different from my own rides. (Up and down west coast, northeast corridor, a couple times across the middle - highly recommended if you have a few days to spare).
Usually it’s 5 minutes of waiting, and for me I don’t recall ever more than 20.
Riding across the entire country (Oakland -> Philadelphia) I probably accrued 30 minutes of waiting.
If we suppose that a privatized passenger carrier would want to make a profit, shedding long-distance trains would be wise, but several Amtrak directors have been against doing so time and time again.
[1] http://reasonrail.blogspot.com/2012/12/amtrak-routes-by-2012... [2] http://www.riarp.org/blog/2014/11/25/september-amtrak-report
The buck always stops somewhere else.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/dea...
[2] https://www.aar.org/Pages/AARMembers.aspx
It should not be humanly possible to configure the train to run at 80 mph over a section of track rated for 30 mph. The idea that some people say we need billions of dollars to make this work only compounds the embarrassment.
We want Level 5 self driving cars but we can't control a single variable (velocity) in a 1 dimensional problem space?!
Shame. Shame. Shame.
US still has these on two lines. For some unfathomable reason the regulators allowed not installing these.
But I have a feeling that the money sucking industry selling a particular solution called "Positive Train Control" has managed to create some sort of undeployable monstrosity. And what we actually need is something completely different which costs virtually nothing to implement.
I've spent almost the last decade involved with designing and implementing the messaging system behind PTC. Every one of these disasters makes me wish it was deployed everywhere. But for better or worse, railroads are incredibly change and risk intolerant. Everything goes through extensive testing before being rolled out into the field, which can add several years to any rollout plan.
The article mentioned crap like differential GPS. Completely unnecessary. You don't need to be that accurate, I mean good grief, +/- 100 feet would be just fine for dealing with such gross overspeed detection.
I can't believe this is actually a problem. Pure politics/bureaucracy. It's certainly not a technical problem.
1) Engineer selects the train's starting position (the station and departure gate) and selects the route.
2) Train software presses the equivalent of a 'trip reset' button that our cars have had forever. Current Position = 0.0
3) The train and the engineer each program a maximum speed. The train determines the maximum speed by selecting the maxSpeed which has the highest Position less than currentPosition. The engineer determines the maximum speed as she normally would.
4) The train's speed must not exceed the lower of the two configured maximum speeds.
This probably runs into issues with accumulated error, especially if the error in speed measurement has a serial correlation.
Typically there's no single nor double integration required for a wheeled ground vehicle; distance (revolutions times wheel circumference) is the primary measurement, with speed being trivially computed from that plus an accurate clock.
That said, inertial nav can take a plane across the country without correction and get within sight of the target.
I think integrating actual speed while on rails would be vastly more accurate.
And really, it just need to augment gps.
is there any reason they invented a new system (expensive and slow to rollout) vs. using an existing tried and tested one?
the main UK system (there are two) is nothing to write home about, but it is gloriously simple and was very fast and cheap to deploy: two metal transmitters live in the track bed coming up to a hazard, spaced such that they are 1 second apart at the maximum speed
if the train detector passes over both in less than 1 second then the brakes are triggered automatically
they look like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_Protection_%26_Warning_S...
TPWS was always a stopgap (rolled out in the 90s while ETCS was being developed); as I said it was cheap and easy to deploy, and has prevented many accidents exactly like this one for 25 years
ETCS does what you are describing, and has been live in the UK and Europe since the early 00s
it works, and is slowly being rolled out everywhere replacing TPWS
so, again, why re-invent the wheel?
even the Chinese are adopting it
The Pennsylvania Railroad had the equivalent of positive train control on all their mainlines by the late 50s. It's sad that we don't have it everywhere almost 60 years later
The fact is that PTC is an expensive way to increase the safety of one of the safest ways people can travel. Automobiles are far more dangerous. If the billions of dollars being spent on PTC were instead used to expand passenger service (and take cars off the road) we would almost certainly save more lives.
Also keep in mind that PTC solves just one of many ways that train wrecks can occur. It is not hard to find examples of other recent fatal incidents that PTC would have done nothing to prevent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valhalla_train_crash
I would say more than partially. Large portions of their revenue suddenly shifted to use those subsidized highways and airports. Sudden shocks are hard, even for a company doing financially well like the Pennsy was until the last few years.
My point is more that this technology has largely existed for the past 60 years. Even implemented slowly over the last 30 years, that time would have left us with a system that had most of the benefits of PTC.
> The fact is that PTC is an expensive way to increase the safety of one of the safest ways people can travel. Automobiles are far more dangerous. If the billions of dollars being spent on PTC were instead used to expand passenger service (and take cars off the road) we would almost certainly save more lives.
No argument. I hate cars. Car culture is toxic and causes so many problems.
> Also keep in mind that PTC solves just one of many ways that train wrecks can occur. It is not hard to find examples of other recent fatal incidents that PTC would have done nothing to prevent:
Just because a safety feature wouldn't prevent every accident doesn't mean it shouldn't be used. The question is how much of a benefit does it bring?
Travel by rail may be one of the safest methods of travel (citation needed) but the US has much more dangerous rail infrastructure than the rest of the developed world. There doesn't seem to be a good reason for this.
The fatal train crash in this article was on the first run of a newly expanded line. It injured more people than were on the train because it fell on the freeway.
You may be able to cherry pick train crashes that PTC would not have prevented but my understanding is that several recent (last 10 years) fatal crashes would have been prevented by PTC.
A bit more recent on it can be read at http://www.qsm.com/blog/2016/impossible-region-revisited
Given the estimate of how long something takes, and dividing it up amongst the people who can do it, and then say... we're going to deliver it in 75% of the optimal time (based on the size of the project - increasing the speed of getting it done by adding people and having a more aggressive schedule)...
Well, for the data set of 20,000 projects there were 750 that were trying to deliver in less than 75% of the optimal time. Of those 750, none were able to be completed in that time.
Granted, that was for software projects. But I suspect that beurocratic projects have similar problems. Need it done faster? Add more people. Have more people? Need more meetings. Have more tasks going on at once? More likely that someone is going to be waiting on another task getting complete because of a bad (overly optimistic) estimate / deadline. Have more people doing nothing at any given time? Spend money faster... and run out of budget all that much faster.
(Yeah, you have to integrate with the engines themselves, but that seems like not a 6-year project, and especially not once it's been designed and tested. It probably also won't account for "stop, there's something else on the tracks", but just speed-checking seems like it would be a massive reduction of risk with very little complexity...)
Funding for PTC inevitably is politically motivated. There are petty projects or requirements tacked onto the main project by various stakeholders, in regardless of technical feasibility.
Railroads are usually operation centric companies focusing on day to day operation. Their expertise is not at designing, engineering, or building things. Outside vendors are brought in to bid on the PTC project. Due to high risk and high liability, only a few companies have the financial backing to put up the surety bond to bid on the project. Sometimes there's only one bidder. The competent ones know the high cost and long time to build the thing and decide to stay put. The less competent one misjudges the time and cost, provides the lowest bid, and becomes the general contractor.
Nobody has a complete set of technologies to implement the entire PTC project. The general contractor has the financial mean but not the technologies. Numerous subcontractors bid on various parts of the project to join the party. The selection of these subcontractors and their technologies sometime are political. The general contractor might not like a sub but is forced to take on the sub because of pressure. A working combination might not be transferable to different railroads due to different vendor/technologies winning the bids.
Pretty much all the vendor technologies are proprietary, and integration among them is a nightmare. Some of them sound good on paper and on promise but fall short when the rubber meets the road. In the failure case I cited above, one fortune 500 company acting as a sub provides a critical part which simply cannot be integrated with the rest of the system. It was too late and too expensive to pick another vendor and the project went into limbo due to running out of funding.
The testing cycle is very long. You are retrofitting a busy daily running railroad live, with people's lives at stake.
Deleted Comment
It’s easy to overweight recent events. Can this be true? It feels like there’s a piece missing somewhere.
[0] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2011/06/02/comparative-ra...
Still, this wreck is sad, and also embarrassing. Our rail system is just not a meaningful transportation network, and is such a missed opportunity. Even small efforts at improving it seem to end in failure, or even disaster.
In the realm of railways, most fatalities tend to be suicides causing no additional deaths, which are often analyzed separately. The EU does this [1], while the Guardian article only raises this distinction halfway through.
Once you exclude suicides, there are several other categories that are useful to distinguish: collisions (e.g. between two trains), derailments, accidents at road-crossings, and 'accidents to persons caused by rolling stock in motion' [2]. The share of accidents by category will tell you a lot about a particular country's issues; a relatively large amount of level crossing accidents may suggest that not enough of the rail network may be grade separated (e.g. Poland, Hungary, Romania), while a high share (and absolute number) of collisions or derailments would be a serious cause for alarm.
Also consider this 2012 post [3] which compares collisions and derailments per usage by country between Europe and the US, originally written as a response to that 2011 article.
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?... [2] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/... [3] http://reasonrail.blogspot.com/2012/07/us-and-european-rail-...