Congress on Wednesday quietly gave the railroad industry what it demanded: a three- to five-year delay in the deadline for installing the kind of safety technology that could have prevented last spring’s deadly Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia.
The move, tucked into a three-week-long extension of an about-to-expire highway law, came despite objections from some Democratic senators who accused lawmakers of bowing to immense pressure from the railroads, which had warned they would have to impose an economically crippling nationwide rail shutdown if they couldn’t get relief from the congressional mandate by the end of this month. Other powerful lobbies, including oil and farming industry groups, had joined the push for more time for railroads to install the anti-collision technology, known as positive train control.
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The Senate approved the bill by voice vote Wednesday afternoon, meaning no lawmakers had to go on record as supporting the delay. Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, voted no — but did not try to block the bill from going forward.
The Senate subsequently confirmed Obama administration nominee Sarah Feinberg as chief of the Federal Railroad Administration, the main agency in charge of overseeing rail safety. Boxer later said she agreed to let the delay go forward in return for Feinberg finally getting a vote, but insisted she wasn't happy about the way railroads got the multi-year extension.
"People are dying, they're being injured because we don't have positive train control," said Boxer, who had helped enact the mandate in 2008 after a collision near Los Angeles that killed 25 people. That mandate had a deadline by the end of this year, which she offered Wednesday to extend by one year.
"Some of the railroads are dragging their feet," Boxer said on the floor after the vote. "They have every excuse in the book."
She also read aloud from a statement by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who called the delay's insertion into the highway bill as an "insult to the families who have lost loved ones."
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) countered that the existing deadline was unrealistic and said a "congressionally caused rail shutdown" would have caused "cascading" damage across the economy. The railroads argued they would have had no choice but to throttle back traffic rather than take the risk of operating illegally without the required equipment.
Railroads now have until Dec. 31, 2018, to put in place the anti-collision technology, which uses GPS, radio frequencies and other signals to communicate information on trains' locations and movements, automatically hitting the brakes if a locomotive speeds too fast or comes close to colliding with another train. They can have up to two more years to make the systems fully operational, provided they jump through some regulatory hoops first.
The industry's top lobbying group, the Association of American Railroads, praised the action and said freight railroads had already spent $6 billion to put the technology in place. Railroads have blamed a host of technical obstacles for preventing them from meeting the original deadline, including trouble acquiring the necessary slices of radio spectrum.
“The extension means freight and passenger railroads can continue moving forward with the ongoing development, installation, real-world testing and validation of this complex technology," association President Edward Hamberger said in a statement.
The House Transportation Committee's top Democrat, Peter DeFazio of Oregon, called the terms of the postponement "very fair and tough."
"We don't want to get to this point again," he told reporters after marking up the House's long-term highway and transit bill on Thursday.
Practically, Congress was never going to let this year's deadline stand, especially once freight and commuter railroads threatened operational shutdowns that could wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs and bottleneck billions of dollars’ worth of commerce.
Railroads and their supporters in other industries bombarded congressional offices with letters detailing the havoc they anticipated without a deadline extension. Water treatment utilities warned they wouldn’t be able to get chemicals needed to ensure drinking water supplies were free of germs that cause diseases like cholera and typhoid. Agricultural companies and manufacturers warned that their key shipments wouldn’t make it to market. Railroads told the Pentagon that vital shipments to military bases and defense contractors could halt, and transit agencies in places like Chicago had similar messages for their passengers.
The terms that lawmakers of both parties ultimately agreed upon were tougher than the proposals each chamber had proposed on its own. The compromise retains the House approach of a December 2018 deadline for full implementation, rather than the Senate's requirement for just hardware installation — a compromise Boxer backed.
Railroads could get an extension of up to two years only after meeting certain benchmarks, such as installing equipment and obtaining spectrum rights needed for the technology’s components to communicate with each other. Freight railroads and Amtrak would have to either fully implement positive train control or demonstrate the technology on working trains within most of their territories to get more time to bring the rest into compliance.
In addition, the Department of Transportation can impose civil penalties on any railroad that doesn’t comply with the revised implementation plan it must submit to regulators under the compromise. So if a carrier says it will complete installation by the end of 2017 and blows the deadline, it will have to cough up fines.
Unless Congress extends the deadline again.
The National Transportation Safety Board has advocated for some form of positive train control for more than 45 years and says it would have prevented scores of accidents over the past few decades. That includes May's Amtrak crash, which killed eight people and injured more than 200 others after a speeding train careened off the track around a bend.
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An August report by the Federal Railroad Administration showed that another three to five years will be required to install the systems on more than 700 trains. Of that number, more than 400 trains run by more than four operators probably won’t be ready for preliminary testing of the system until 2018.
Still, some lawmakers argued against a blanket extension by pointing to progress that some railroads were making against all odds.
Rep. Janice Hahn (D-Calif.) has pointed to California commuter railroad Metrolink — which was involved in the 2008 crash that inspired the mandate — as one that was on track to meet this year's deadline. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a vocal safety advocate, has said railroad owners making “good-faith” efforts to get the technology in place should be the only ones who get wiggle room.
Amtrak has said it’s on track to complete activation of the systems by the end of this year along its busy Northeast Corridor, which hosts more than 2,200 Amtrak, commuter and freight trains per day, by the current Dec. 31 deadline. The Government Accountability Office said in a report last month that that won't include the immediate vicinities of hubs like Washington’s Union Station, where Amtrak plans to restrict speed through other means.
Feinberg said in a statement Wednesday evening that she wants to see the technology "implemented as soon as possible."
"The additional tools the Congress has given FRA will allow us to hold railroads accountable so that they meet critical milestones on the path to full implementation," the newly confirmed rail safety chief said.
Heather Caygle contributed to this report.
