The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) said in a quarterly status update that 42 railroads required to install positive train control are making "steady progress," but the railroads "must still complete significant work" to implement their systems by a Dec. 31, 2020, deadline.

FRA Administrator Ronald Batory said the agency is working to help address the technical challenges facing the railroads, including starting revenue service demonstration, interoperability testing and safety plans.

PTC could have helped prevent a fatal passenger train derailment in Washington state. Source: NTSBPTC systems use communication-based and processor-based train control technology to prevent train-to-train collisions, overspeed derailments, incursions into established work zone limits and movements of trains through switches in the wrong position.

In May, the National Transportation Safety Board said that PTC could have helped prevent a fatal overspeed derailment of an Amtrak passenger train in December 2017 in Washington state. In the accident, the train derailed on an overpass as it entered a 30 mph curve at roughly 78 mph. The lead locomotive and four rail cars fell onto Interstate 5 where they struck eight vehicles.

“This is the third fatal overspeed passenger train derailment the NTSB has investigated since 2013,” Robert Sumwalt, the NTSB chairman said at the time. Sumwalt said that all three could have been prevented by PTC.

In 2008, Congress passed the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 requiring PTC systems to be fully implemented by Dec. 31, 2015, on Class I railroads’ main lines that transport poison or toxic-by-inhalation hazardous materials and any main lines with regularly scheduled intercity or commuter rail passenger service.

In October 2015, Congress extended the deadline by at least three years to Dec. 31, 2018. It required FRA to approve any railroad’s request for an “alternative schedule and sequence” with a final deadline not later than Dec. 31, 2020, if a railroad showed it met certain statutory criteria.

(Read "Feds urge railroads to speed up work on train controls.")

In its quarterly report, the FRA said that as of June 30, 2019, PTC systems were in operation on roughly 50,300 (87%) of the nearly 58,000 route miles required to be equipped by Congress.

Host commuter railroads were operating their PTC systems in revenue service demonstration (RSD), a type of required advanced field testing, on approximately 698 route miles and in revenue service on 443 route miles. That amounted to 37% of the host commuter railroads’ 3,111 required route miles.

Class I freight railroads reported that PTC systems were in operation on around 91% of their required main lines as of June 2019. As a host railroad, Amtrak reported that roughly 899 of Amtrak’s 901 (99.8%) required route miles were governed by a PTC system. Amtrak also informed FRA that its operations are currently governed by a PTC system on at least 16,032 of the 19,119 route miles (84%) where Amtrak operates as a tenant railroad on other railroads’ PTC-equipped main lines.

FRA said it will host a series of PTC Collaboration Sessions in the coming months to further support all railroads subject to the statutory mandate and to enable technical experts to share best practices and jointly resolve common technical problems.

Since 2008, the federal government has awarded nearly $2.6 billion in grant funding and loan financing to support railroads’ implementation of PTC systems. That amounts to around 18% of the industry’s estimates for initial PTC system implementation costs.