SEPTA mixup gave passengers jarring stop
Welcome to the Inquirer's latest blog, a look at the ins and outs of transportation in our region. You'll find here a look behind some of the stories that appear in the Inquirer or a different angle on them, some news about interesting transportation initiatives in other parts of the country and how those might apply to Philadelphia, and a place where readers can have a conversation with the paper's transportation reporter about their complaints and problems in the world of transportation. We'll also alert readers to day-to-day transit conditions such as delays and breakdowns.
An abrupt, unexpected stop on a train is likely to cause a passenger's stomach to drop just as fast. One reader said he recently experienced exactly that repeatedly while riding the Norristown Line. He asked to remain unnamed, but SEPTA confimed trains on that line came to unexpected stops more than once the first week of this month. The reason, they said, is related to a federally mandated safety system that has gotten a lot of attention since May's Amtrak crash in Philadelphia, PTC.
Positive Train Control is an automatic braking system that should stop a train if an engineer isn't obeying speed and movement signals. It would have prevented that fatal Amtrak crash from happening. And a federal mandate that it be installed in 40 rail systems nationwide by the end of the year has made Dec. 31 the most important, and dreaded, dates on the calendar for the country's transportation agencies. It's a fairly complicated technology that involves refitting both trains and the rails themselves, and linking them through satellites. Here's a graphic SEPTA provided giving a sense of how it works.
So what went wrong? Much of SEPTA's rail fleet are Silverliner IV's, which date to the Carter Administration, and the Silverliner V's, which are at most five years old. In the process of installing the PTC systems the brakes on the trains needed to be rewired, and SEPTA used the specifications for the Silverliner IV brakes on the whole fleet. Worked fine for the Silverliner IV's. Not so much for the newer trains. With a Silverliner IV's brake wiring, what was supposed to be a gradual slowdown turned into a stop on some of the newer trains, said Michael Monastero, who is in charge of the PTC installation on SEPTA trains.
These kinds of snafus are part of the process when installing something as complicated as PTC, Monastero said. SEPTA is racing to get the system up before a federally mandated Dec. 31 deadline that expects 40 rail systems around the country to have the system online.
Virtually every affected rail line has said they won't be able to meet the deadline. The Government Accountability Office issued a report in September saying almost no rail lines will meet the deadline. SEPTA said they could make the deadline, but sent a letter to Congress last month saying if they could get more time, they wouldn't complain. My colleague Jonathan Tamari down in D.C. says Congress may come up with a plan to extend the deadline this week, so stay tuned.
The challenges of getting this system installed for a looming deadline is also something we'll keep an eye on here.
This is the first post in our new transportation blog, In Transit. The goal is to offer a look at the interesting, perplexing, frustrating and funny aspects of getting from point A to point B in this region. Between car services, bike shares, surging interest in rail and a big pot of state money for roads, there are more ways to get around than ever and I'd like to talk about them all. I'm pretty new to the transportation beat so I'll be learning as I go as well, and am going to be very interested in your feedback about things you'd like to see explored. My email address is jlaughlin@phillynews.com and my twitter handle is @jasmlaughlin. I'd like to hear from you.