News

Local train safety measures failing to meet national deadlines

BOSTON — Thursday morning's deadly train crash in New Jersey is reminding MBTA riders of safety improvements slated to be made next year.

Braking technology called positive train control (PTC) works as an automatic stopping system that can slow down a speeding train if the engineer misses a signal or is going too fast.

PTC was not installed on the tracks in Hoboken where the train crash killed one person and injured more than 100 others.

In the Boston area, MassDOT has outlined plans to install PTC, but it's falling several years behind national deadlines initially set for 2015 then extended to 2018.

FOX25's Chris Flanagan pressed MassDOT Secretary of Transportation Stephanie Pollack on why it's taking so long, but got stonewalled.

Pollack would not answer questions about required safety systems for the MBTA while at a conference in Boston.

"There will be time later to find out what happened and understand and learn from it," she said.

NTSB inspectors said PTC could have prevented a crash last year in Philadelphia that killed eight people. It's unclear if the technology would have prevented the crash in Hoboken.

“The question was, will we be looking at PTC? Absolutely. PTC has been one of our priorities,” an NTSB spokesperson said at a news conference in New Jersey Thursday morning. “We know that it can prevent accidents. Whether it is involved in this accident -- that is definitely one of the things that we will look at carefully.”

Rail lines in the United States were supposed to install the technology by the end of last year, seven years after the deadline was announced, but the NTSB extended that deadline three additional years to 2018.

The South Side Commuter Rail out of South Station will be ready by December 2018; followed by the North Side Commuter Rail -- out of North Station -- in March of 2020.

Phase three – the freight main line – will be installed by August 2020. That’s two years past the federal deadline.

The upgrades will cost more than $451 million just for the commuter rail updates. And the project could mean weekend shutdowns for commuter rail lines from March 2017 into 2018.