PositiveTrainControl
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Congress pushes deadline to make trains safer to 2018
If you travel by train or live near tracks, Congress is not doing you any favors. Yesterday it passed a bill extending the deadline (see Section 1302) for the implementation of the potentially life-saving Positive Train Control (PTC) braking control system on all trains by three years to December 31, 2018. PTC slows trains that are traveling too fast based on their location and could stop deadly derailments. It acts as a backup for distracted engineers that have failed to slow their locomotives when approaching curves or have ignored signals. According to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), up to 70 percent of rail operators would not meet the safety standard by the original December 31, 2015 deadline.
