Railroad companies fight safety rules, with help from GOP and Obama

Railroad companies fight safety rules, with help from GOP and Obama
By Justine Sharrock, Laurie Udesky and Stuart Silverstein
January 19, 2012

Less than four years after a California train disaster spurred passage of major safety legislation, railroad companies are pushing hard to relax the law’s chief provision.

They have won over key Republicans, and extracted a major concession from the Obama administration, in their bid to scale back and delay a system to prevent crashes such as the head-on collision that caused 25 deaths and 135 injuries in Chatsworth, Calif.

The Rail Safety Improvement Act, passed in late 2008 soon after the Chatsworth disaster, mandated the $13 billion project and stuck railroad companies with nearly all of the cost. The law calls for installation of a technology known as Positive Train Control, or PTC, that automatically puts the brakes on trains about to collide or derail.

The technology’s champions include the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent advisory and investigative agency. It has advocated PTC for more than two decades to prevent accidents resulting from human error, the main cause of rail crashes.

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http://openchannel.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/18/10186068-railroad-companies-fight-safety-rules-with-help-from-gop-and-obama


The Chatsworth rail disaster in 2008 caused 25 deaths and 135 injuries


The 2005 rail crash in Graniteville, S.C., killed nine people and caused the evacuation of 5,400.