The Department of Transportation is under fire from Democratic lawmakers as they press the agency for answers about the Amtrak train that derailed in Washington last month, which took the lives of three passengers and injured many more.
In question is whether the department has been fully implementing a provision of the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act that instructs passenger railroads to locate high-hazard curves on the train tracks, and then file an action plan to the DOT to boost safety in those hazardous areas.
“What’s the big secret? DOT should be transparent about who’s complying and who’s not. We should know what those plans say, we should have them fully implemented, and we should have the law enforced,” the author of the provision, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., told the Washington Examiner.
In the Washington derailment, the National Transportation Security Board determined that an Amtrak train going from Seattle to Portland was traveling at 80 mph in a 30 mph zone as it was about to enter a curve just before it derailed.
Amid the investigation related to the derailment, nine Democratic lawmakers, including Maloney, signed a letter to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao this month demanding answers about the implementation of Maloney’s provision and copies of any action plans.
“Specifically, we would like to know if Amtrak has submitted any speed limit action plans to the DOT for review and approval, as required by law, and whether DOT reviewed and approved such plans,” the letter reads.
The department is still reviewing the letter, a DOT spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.
Meanwhile, Amtrak claims that action plans had been submitted and approved, but did not apply to the route where the derailment occurred, since it did not exist at the time.
“Under the law, Amtrak submitted its action plans to DOT regarding compliance with this requirement, which were approved by the secretary,” said Jason Abrams, communications lead at Amtrak. “These plans were related to the existing Amtrak operations at the time of submittal and didn’t cover the Point Defiance Bypass portion of the Cascades route, as it was not in operation when the plans were submitted.”
The train was on its inaugural run of the route when it derailed.
Maloney said the derailment was preventable and pointed to other recent and similar Amtrak derailments: the 2015 derailment in Philadelphia and the 2013 derailment in New York City.
“That’s three times that this has happened in the last five years,” he added. “We’ve lost a lot of innocent lives, and it’s 100 percent preventable.”
Maloney said his provision in the FAST Act asked railroads to identify some “common sense” solutions to deal with high-hazard curves, which are those that require a speed reduction of more than 20 mph. Some of these solutions include modifying existing automatic train control and other signal systems, boosting the size of the crew and crew communications, and installing alert systems in cabs.
“There are some very important common sense steps, including identify high-hazard curves and having a plan for them,” Maloney said, noting that the curves remain the same. “They don’t change from one day to the next; there’s only so many of them. That’s the nice thing about railroads — they’re in the same place every day, and there’s only so many of them.
“These plans won’t be the whole solution; that’s going to require positive train control, and we’ve done real work on that as well. But at a minimum, we need to know that the law is being enforced by the Department of Transportation in respect to high-hazard curves,” he added.
Lawmakers are pushing for positive train control to be completed by the end of 2018. The technology automatically reduces speeds of trains that are over the speed limit. Although it had been installed on segments of the track in the Washington derailment, Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., told the Washington Examiner it was not operational at the time of the accident.
According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the derailment would have been prevented with functioning positive train control.
In 2008, Congress first instructed railroads to install positive train control with a deadline of full implementation by Dec. 31, 2015. However, as the deadline approached in 2015, lawmakers delayed it to Dec. 31, 2018, with the possibility of an extension to Dec. 31, 2020, if the railroad meets certain requirements.
But DeFazio, the ranking Democratic member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, wants positive train control to be implemented this year.
“I want to see PTC implemented as quickly as possible,” DeFazio said.
As a result, DeFazio introduced the Positive Train Control Implementation and Financing Act of 2018 on Jan. 11, which would require railroads to implement and install the system by the end of 2018.
“We want to see that this deadline is met this time,” he said.
DeFazio’s legislation extends $2.5 billion in grant money to assist commuter railroads and intercity railways in installing positive train control.
Although the letter submitted to the Department of Transportation was signed only by Democrats, Maloney noted his provision in the FAST Act had attracted bipartisan support from Republicans including Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
Additionally, he said he had no reason to believe Republicans would not back him and other Democrats as they seek answers related to the derailment.
“The truth is, there is good bipartisan support on the committee to fix this problem,” Maloney said.
Maloney said he and others who signed the letter want to know the full details concerning enforcement of the provision. He expects that it will be revealed his provision has been partially followed, and is calling for full compliance and transparency from the Department of Transportation so lawmakers can evaluate whether it is helping.
“If you had to speak with a family that’s lost someone in an accident like this, you certainly feel an obligation to do something about it,” Maloney said. “This is a problem that we can fix; this is not beyond our capability to solve.
“The sooner we put an end to [derailments], the more lives we’re going to save,” he added.
