Senior committee leaders in the House are questioning the Federal Communications Commission’s timetable for installing positive train control antennas across the country.
The Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 mandates that PTCs be installed by the end of 2015, but federal environmental and historic review processes for the project will likely cause the PTC installation to miss its deadline.
The PTC implementation will be the first such attempt in the world and will deploy at least 22,000 rail-side antennas. The FCC recognized that it could not accommodate the project’s required timeline and advised the railroads not to proceed with any type of reviews until a method for expediting the notification and review processes can be established.
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) and Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) recently sent a letter regarding the delay to FCC Acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn.
“The delay caused by this freeze and the FCC’s environmental and historic review processes adversely affects the railroads’ ability to deploy PTC and delays implementation of safety systems mandated by Congress,” Shuster and Upton said. “We urge the FCC to move expeditiously to put a process in place to facilitate the timely deployment of PTC.”
Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, and Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials, also signed the letter.
The Association of American Railroads describes PTC as technologies designed to automatically reduce the speed of a train to eliminate accidents caused by human error. The systems mandated in the RSIA are overlay systems that will supplement existing train control systems.