My wife, the lovely B. Leilani Johnson, born on the island of Oahu, raised out west ("those California girls are really the most"),thinks it's difficult to find the proper gift for me.
"What would you like for Christmas?" she asks.
She receives my extended silence in return.
I have no clue, literally, what I want as a present. So I say, annually, or biannually because my birthdays seem to roll around faster than Harry Truman's used to and I have no idea what I want for my birthday either, "a book."
And she says, "Again? You have so many."
And I say, "That's part of my plan."
And she says, "What plan?"
And I say, "My plan to live forever. Where I come from you're not allowed to die until you've finished all the books you have at home. Right now, if I keep up the one-a-week pace, I'm good until 2125."
She shakes her head. "Our poor great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren," she says.
Well, the careful reader will recall, or maybe not, that in the past I wished that FRA revise its mandatory PTC reporting practices so that we might just be able to assess the reliability of PTC systems by measuring failures, cut-outs, malfunctions as rates of occurrence.
I advocate a revision of the reporting requirements because, despite the delays in its installation, PTC still is a new technology for train control; and, as compromised as PTC has been and is by its (mostly) relegation as an overlay to the legacy systems of train control, certain critical questions, and incidents, will arise and we should be prepared.
Yes, 49CFR 236.1023(h) contains a reporting requirement that is almost "boiler plate," and 49CFR 236.1029 (h) stipulates the submission of an annual report of system failures.
49CFR 236.1023(k) extends the immediate reporting requirements of 49CFR part 233 in cases "resulting in a more favorable aspect than intended or other condition hazardous to the movement of a train." "False clears" must be reported immediately. But what are the "other conditions hazardous to the movement of a train" that are covered by the immediate reporting requirement of 49CFR 233?
Ever helpful, FRA provided the following examples during its PTC Collaboration Session #5:
Pretty clear, right? I mean the emphasis on braking is self-evident, particularly since the law mandates that PTC systems prevent train-to-train collisions, but the regulation accepts a reduction in the speeds of collision rather than prevention as a "substitute." Any failure of the PTC system to initiate braking based on prediction, only compounds the already existing risk of lower speed collisions.
It is the last bullet point, regarding the transmission, recording, and proper execution of an authority to a train already in operation in PTC territory that presents new challenges, or challenge in a new mode that has been around in one form or another for years. And that challenge is, "How are we going to know?"
Back in the day, I mean yesterday or today, and probably the next few tomorrows, if conditions arose requiring the modification of a train's authority, including its speeds authorized by the timetable, the dispatcher issued via radio or telephone, or block line, a "mandatory directive," known out here in the east by its designation as a specific "Form." Form M, Form D, I've even seen Form Y.
All are mandatory directives that require the dispatcher to transmit the information to the crew, but not to a crew member operating the controls of a moving train; that the crew member repeat the information to the dispatcher and the dispatcher "audit" the readback for any non-conformity. Cumbersome, yes, but that's the price of being sure.
Now the modification of authority will be transmitted from one machine to another machine, from the back-office server to the on-board computer. Yes, the directive will be displayed, in some systems, on the locomotive engineer's display. However if railroads do not maintain the readback and audit requirements, the conformity of transmitted and received authorities remains unknown, possibly until it's too late.
I've remarked before about the historical distinction in US railroading between the means of communication and the authority for train movements. The latter is "vital." The former is not. I've remarked before about this separation tracks, more or less, the separation between office and field, where vitality, occupancy, is registered and resides in the field, separate and apart from whatever communications made to, or received from the office.
I've also remarked before that the new systems of train control are employing technologies that tend to overcome the boundaries between field and office. The UK has already experienced the risk this type of convergence, this type of overtake of authority by the means of communication, entails.
A means for determining the conformity of modifications to authorities, separate and apart from the blizzard of 1s and 0s, the electronic handshakes, must be maintained to protect the vitality of the operating system. There is no substitute for the readback and audit process.
This risk is present also during initialization of the locomotive prior to movement. Modifications and restrictions to authority transmitted will require "auditing" for conformity, and that means the crew register process must include review and copies of relevant bulletin orders from a source separate and apart from the back office servers handling initialization.
Vitality continues to require field separation from the office.
When 49 USC 20157 was enacted, extending the PTC deadline, paragraph (j)(4) required railroads to report to FRA PTC failures to initialize, PTC cut-outs, and PTC malfunctions. FRA determined that railroads with fully implemented PTC systems must submit reports monthly. Railroads operating FRA-certified systems that were not yet fully implemented would report these exceptions quarterly. These requirements expire on December 31, 2021.
Railroads have been providing (theoretically) these reports for four years now, and what have we, meaning you and me, learned? Me, I've learned nothing since FRA has not to my knowledge provided any data aggregated by PTC system type, and scrubbed of clues to the railroads' identities, to the public. You? Has your experience been different? And FRA? What has it learned? Maybe nothing because it seems nobody at FRA can answer the simplest of questions: how many trains starts in PTC territories are scheduled daily?
Maybe somebody has learned something, but again to my knowledge FRA has yet to publish any analysis, or report, on the aggregated data, identifying strengths, weaknesses, trends up or trends down. Is it just me? I know I'm more distracted now, even in semi-lockdown, than I ever was while holding down a job as an operating officer. I skim more than I read, even books, as much as that might shorten my lifespan. Maybe it's me. Maybe not.
FRA by deliberation or inaction, or deliberate inaction, has established a history of requiring railroads to report operating performance of PTC systems without FRA processing that data and providing its own parallel reporting to the public. Railroads were required to report PTC system performance as part of revenue service demonstration operations. SCRRA, Metrolink, first out of the blocks, reported and left unredacted its numbers for public access, but that lasted about 5 or 6 months. The RSD performance report from other railroads were so heavily redacted as to be worthless to the public.
Obtaining scrubbed information from FRA through FOIA was a process that involved so much delay, yielded such fragmentary information as to make the experience intolerable, and I say that with as much love and respect as I can muster.
FRA provided the reporting format information submitted in compliance with 20157 (j) (4). That format certainly captures the data necessary for aggregation and analysis, but again, does anyone know where that aggregation and analysis are? I don't, and I'll be damned if I go through FOIA again.
Requiring the public to apply through FOIA for scrubbed, but raw, data that a regulatory agency acquires through mandatory reporting is antithetical to the reason for establishing the regulatory agency in the first place. The establishment of the regulatory agency is first and foremost recognition of existence of the industry as a compound entity possessing a dual identity: private property, but not only private property, but public, social, utility. Perhaps that is better expressed as a public, social utility encapsulated, formed by and as private property.
With such a recognition, clearly the purpose of reporting requirements is to improve the publics' knowledge and understanding of the issues and challenges confronting the agency charged with regulating these compound entities. The agency then has a reporting obligation to the public parallel to the obligation the industry has to the agency. The purpose of both reporting mechanisms is the same: providing more complete information so that actions taken or not taken will be data-driven and not determined by anecdote, opinion, caprice, or special influence.
So, that's a long way of getting here, and to gifts and holidays. It was a week before Christmas and nobody knew what to get me, oblivious as I am to holidays in general and traditions of gift-giving in particular.
I was idly skimming my daily E-version of the Federal Register and wham-o! There it was. FRA had eavesdropped on my dreams and decided to get me a gift. Staring me in the face was FRA's NPRM for changing PTC system reporting requirements.
Full disclosure, as time is tight (Booker T. & the MG'S, 1969), I skipped the preamble and scooted down the page to the proposed rule itself.
I was gratified to read that in addition to reporting:
mandatory reporting will include:
because if we divide the top bullet points by the appropriate bottom bullet points, we can get meaningful rates and ratios. We can identify trends.
My joy at receiving this unanticipated gift from this unanticipated source was dampened a bit by the stipulation that the reports be submitted biannually instead of the quarterly I had dreamt, but nobody gives a perfect gift all the time.
Then I realized that FRA had not addressed in the preamble if and how it would make the information available to the public, and I felt like I had received an electronic gift without any batteries; a "gift" that would function only with batteries I had to mail order from another galaxy, the galaxy called FOIA.
Then I realized, as Chico Marx put it, "Ha ha. You can't fool me. There ain't no sanity clause."
Believe it.
David Schanoes
December 26, 2020
I got the lumps in my throat
When I saw her coming down the aisle
I got the wiggle in my knees
When she looked at me and sweetly smiled
--Chuck Berry, "Little Queenie"
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