Buffett's BNSF helped lead fight to delay train safety technology
Source: Reuters
US | Wed Nov 4, 2015 11:19am EST
Buffett's BNSF helped lead fight to delay train safety technology
WASHINGTON | By David Morgan and Nick Carey
When an Amtrak passenger train derailed in Philadelphia in May, killing eight people and injuring scores more, the railroad industry's campaign to delay a Dec. 31 deadline to install technology to prevent such disasters appeared to be finished. ... Not, as it turned out, if billionaire investor Warren Buffett and Sen. John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, had anything to do with it. Thune chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the rail industry.
Last week, under pressure from companies including Buffett's BNSF Railway Co, which has spent more money lobbying Congress this year than any other railroad, U.S. legislators passed, and President Obama signed, a law that delays the so-called positive train control mandate for at least three years, with the possibility of an additional two-year delay.
....
Thune said he realized early on that the New Year's Eve deadline could have dire consequences for the economy and for railroads, which were reporting problems with positive train control systems. ... But after May's Amtrak disaster, "when they announced that this could have been prevented if they'd had positive train control, there was a real spotlight on why we weren't there and what we could do to get there faster," Thune told Reuters in an interview.
Meanwhile, the railroads were hampered by anti-trust considerations that prohibited operators from talking directly with each other to launch a collaborative effort. ... That changed in August after Thune sent letters to the regulatory Surface Transportation Board and individual railroads asking what would happen if the PTC deadline was not extended. His committee then publicized their responses. ... "That was sort of the seminal moment," Thune said. Now the railroads had a channel for their views.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/04/us-railways-safety-lobby-insight-idUSKCN0ST0JB20151104
By RON NIXON NOV. 3, 2015
WASHINGTON — In 1981, while traveling on a corporate jet, Richard M. Bressler, the chairman of the Burlington Northern Railroad, hit on an idea: What if the technology used by airlines to track the location of planes and help prevent accidents was applied to the rail industry?
Mr. Bressler, an engineer by training and a former airline executive, directed a small group of his employees to come up with a similar system for the railroads. The result was a safety system called the Advanced Railroad Electronics System, or ARES, which was soon placed on several trains on a section of track in Minnesota. The system, among other safety features, allowed dispatchers to stop trains automatically if the engineer exceeded speed limits.
But after five years in operation, the project was abruptly shut down in 1993. The company cited the system’s expense and resistance from many managers who did not see how the benefits outweighed the cost of the technology. It calculated that it would have cost about $350 million to install the monitoring hardware and software on the railroad’s entire system, equal to about $580 million today.
On Thursday {October 29}, President Obama signed a bill giving railroads an additional three years to install a more automated safety technology called positive train control on 60,000 miles of track. Congress passed the measure, which extended a Dec. 31 deadline, after industry executives and some lawmakers said the delays were the result, in part, of an “unproven and untested” safety system. ... But internal corporate documents, independent studies and interviews with former Burlington Northern officials show that nearly 30 years ago, the industry had developed a technology that accomplished many of the functions of the modern train safety system.
There's no Wikipedia page for an Advanced Railroad Electronics System, but this shows up as the first hit at Google:
When a railroad almost built a PTC system
By Forrest Van Schwartz | September 26, 2014
Since the early years of railroading, as soon as railroads started to run more than one train at the same time on the same segment of track, the industry has sought various means and technologies to prevent trains from running into each other. Various “control systems” evolved over the decades; most were good, some not so good.
In the early 1980s, one idea for increasing safety (and savings) came from Richard Bressler, Burlington Northern’s chairman and chief executive. He had a long career in the oil industry and became fascinated with new technology developed by the U.S. military: the global positioning system. He approved a team to look for a project using GPS and the vastly improved computer systems available by the mid-1980s.
That team’s efforts led to a project to replace the signal and communications pole line on a former Great Northern route extending west from the Lake Superior ports of Duluth, Minn., and Superior, Wis.
Originally, BN partnered with two other Class I railroads to advance the train-control project, but eventually shouldered the responsibility alone for what became known as the Advanced Railroad Electronics System, or ARES. Information was provided to train crews via radio links to in-cab displays as well as to train dispatchers at the central offices. ... BN chose Rockwell International as the prime contractor for the radio system. ARES became one of the first applications of GPS technology in the railroad industry, used to survey and produce accurate terrain profiles of the track. Locomotive displays included current train location, track profile, switch positions, and signal locations. ARES was the first computerized attempt to calculate non-vital (advisory) braking time and distance along with on-board brake override, particularly important to safely handling heavy trains in extreme weather conditions.
= new reply since forum marked as read
He allows "DOT-111" railcars to transport high-sulfur tar sands crude along his railway, which are known to NOT be built to efficiently contain this cargo, thereby greatly increasing the risk of explosion upon derailment.
Business as usual.