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October 19th, 2015 
Awake Goy 
In a candid letter to a U.S. senator, BNSF Railway’s chief
executive, Carl Ice, said September 9 that BNSF would in effect shut
down most of its network rather than violate a federal law mandating
that positive train control be operational by December 31, 2015. ~ Fred W Frailey
CSX
Transportation has said it, too, questions whether it should violate
federal laws, and other Class I carriers are likely to follow suit. This
set up the real possibility of a national transportation crisis at the
beginning of 2016.
The public may be unaware of how closely the U.S.
economy is tied to railroads, but the reality is that without railroads,
this country will quickly cease to function normally. Imagine, for
instance, no electricity to heat homes.
In his letter to Senator John Thune (R-South Dakota), chairman of the
U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Ice says
that the railroad has already spent $1.5 billion to deploy PTC and will
likely spend another $500 million.
Ultimately, this new technology will
be deployed on half of BNSF’s network, the portion that handles 80
percent of its traffic.
Portions of both transcontinental routes will not be operational
by the December 31 deadline set by Congress in 2008. Nor will commuter
zones in Chicago, Seattle and Minneapolis.
Ice says that to avoid
operating on PTC-mandated subdivisions where PTC will not be installed
before the deadline would force traffic on secondary routes unequipped
to handle it and lead to a paralysis of the railroad.
Ice goes on to explain the railroad’s position. First, BNSF reads the
law as saying no train can legally operate on a PTC-mandated line if
PTC is not in service by December 31, rather than no train carrying
hazardous substances.
Then he goes on to say:
“BNSF, as a matter of law,
corporate policy and principle, does not willfully violate safety
statues or regulations or ask our employees to do so.The announced
enforcement policy by the [Federal Railroad Administration] of imposing
fines for non-performance puts BNSF in a position that will be difficult
to reconcile with our aforementioned unwillingness to willfully violate
safety laws or regulations.BNSF does not believe that it can pick and
choose which safety rules must be followed.”
Ice adds that were his
railroad to operate over lines where PTC is not in place and an accident
occurs, the exposure to legal claims and punitive damages would be
significant.
Ice is careful in his letter not to say BNSF will refuse to
run trains in violation of the law, only that it doesn’t see how it can.
But any reasonable interpretation of his language is that the railroad
will either coagulate to paralysis or operate at a fraction of its
capacity.
The Surface Transportation Board, which regulates railroads, in
effect came to the aid of BNSF and other railroads this past week. Its
chairman, Daniel Elliott, wrote to Thune to say that railroads can
“lawfully suspend service for various reasons, including safety.”
In
other words, Elliott is saying that the common carrier obligation of
railroads is not absolute. Elliott added that CSX has expressed
sentiments similar to those of BNSF.
So what does this all mean? I take railroads at their word that they
have diligently tried to install PTC by the deadline. Six years ago
Congress thought it was giving railroads enough time to do this, and
railroads did not object then to that deadline. Implementation has
been a disaster.
The technology being put in place is largely new. FRA
was slow to issue necessary rules. Signal engineers able to put all the
pieces together have been in short supply. For more than a year
everything ground to a halt because the Federal Communications
Commission would not issue permits for construction of radio towers and
antennae.
Further, as Ice points out to Thune, PTC is full of bugs as railroads
roll it out on their networks. Says Ice: “We are seeing the PTC system
trigger unnecessary braking events in which trains are stopped with a
full-service brake application.
This means that significant work has to
occur before the train can re-start. These kinds of delays are numerous
and cumulatively consume railroad capacity.”
What railroads have sought is an extension of the deadline, something
that Congress has thus far refused to act upon because the votes to
permit an extension aren’t there. Now the industry is beginning to say
fine, we will not disobey the law and as a result we will be able to
offer only a fraction of the service our customers depend upon.
My wife Cathie, who spent her corporate career dealing with political
life in Washington, calls this “classic DC gamesmanship.”
She says the
fact that Carl Ice has now publicly laid out a disastrous outcome that
neither voters nor shippers can countenance means that the problem will
be resolved either by a suspension of the law or an amendment to it
pushing back the deadline. Or maybe not. Who knows?
Our political system is full of hypocrites who pass laws yet will not
deal with the consequences of those laws. This situation cries for
clarity and level-headedness, and we’re seeing little of it in
Washington. You wonder why Republicans are flocking to The Donald? This
is why.
Everyone is hiding from reality—everyone, that is, except a few
brave souls such as Carl Ice, who is unafraid to say the ball is in
Washington’s court and that we as citizens may end up burning our
furniture in the fireplace to stay warm.
October 16, 2015 – KnowTheLies.com
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