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Railroad automatic braking system needs improvement to prevent more derailments, safety board says

BY JOSH FUNK
Updated 7:30 PM EDT, November 1, 2023

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — The automatic braking system railroads were required to install several years ago needs improvement to better prevent collisions, federal safety investigators said in a report Wednesday. ... The National Transportation Safety Board’s report urged the Federal Railroad Administration and the industry to keep developing new technology that can be used to improve Positive Train Control systems. Their recommendations included at least one practical idea that railroads could likely implement relatively quickly.

Railroads spent 12 years and roughly $15 billion to develop and install the automatic braking system after Congress required it in 2008 in the wake of a collision between a commuter and freight train in California that killed 25 and injured more than 100. ... The system, in place on about 58,000 miles (93,000 kilometers) of track nationwide since 2020, is designed to reduce human error by automatically stopping trains in certain situations, such as when they’re in danger of colliding, derailing because of excessive speed, entering tracks under maintenance or traveling the wrong direction.

The National Transportation Safety Board has said more than 150 train crashes since 1969 could have been prevented by Positive Train Control. The agency had recommended the automatic braking system for years before it was mandated by Congress, which extended the original 2015 deadline twice and gave railroads until the end of 2020 to complete the system.

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The National Transportation Safety Board said that too often the system just imposes a low speed limit and relies on engineers to stop their trains in time, which doesn’t always work. ... The system also has a hard time preventing rear-end collisions, partly because it isn’t set up to track how long a train is and doesn’t know where the back of a train is. The board recommended that the Federal Railroad Administration and railroads keep looking for a solution to this using a GPS sensor at the end of a train. ... The braking system also doesn’t have the ability to stop a train if there is an object like a car or person on the tracks, so the safety board also recommended developing a set of sensors that could help with that.

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JOSH FUNK
Josh covers railroads & Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway
https://twitter.com/Funkwrite
jfunk@ap.org