By Chip Kraft, Railway Age Magazine; September 5, 2018
To the degree that the new Amtrak management team is sincerely trying to improve safety, we ought to all support what they are doing. But if Amtrak is only using safety as a stalking horse to pursue another agenda (such as discontinuing L-D trains, as is believed in many circles), it should be called out on it.
“Should Amtrak stop running trains because some PTC systems do not fully meet the requirements of the law, or because their host railroads have not implemented PTC on all or part of their Amtrak routes?” observes my colleague Steve Ditmeyer, among many other roles in his career, an FRA official. “I say no. But I also say that the government should provide funds to Amtrak and its host railroads to implement fully compliant PTC systems on all Amtrak-served routes as soon as possible.”
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