American rail system primitive in safety

Guardian, - Experts say US rail signaling is ‘primitive’ after officials admit an automatic safety system common elsewhere would probably have prevented the derailment

Passenger rail services in Britain and much of western Europe have for many years had automatic safety systems that warn train drivers if they are speeding and then trigger the brakes to prevent the kind of crash that killed eight and injured more than 200 in a derailment in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

... The UK has had a comprehensive automatic braking system that works in conjunction with railway signaling across its network for more than a decade, following upgrades after a series of fatal crashes that occurred from the late 1990s into the early 21st century.

“When it comes to signaling, the Americans are very primitive,” Roger Ford, technology editor of the UK magazine Modern Railways and a trained rail engineer, told the Guardian.

Amtrak has been slow to advance and is currently working towards fitting its version of an automatic safety system, called Positive Train Control, to its services in the north-east in 2015, in line with legislative requirements.

But, on the busiest north-east corridor from Washington to Boston via Philadelphia and New York, it has only been installed successfully at any length on the stretch between Boston and New Haven, Connecticut, the Amtrak president and chief executive, Joseph Boardman, said on Thursday.

America’s sparse rail network is so far behind standards in countries that rely heavily on high-speed rail, such as the UK, France and Japan, that Nutter and commentators said on US TV on Wednesday evening that they had never heard of positive train control until after the latest crash happened.