Wednesday, June 21, 2000 (Washington, DC)

U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney E. Slater today announced the award of a $34 million contract to a team led by Lockheed Martin Corporation for the development and deployment of a Positive Train Control (PTC) system on a 120-mile segment of the Chicago-to- St. Louis high speed rail passenger corridor.

In addition, Secretary Slater announced a $6.5 million grant to the Illinois Department of Transportation as part of the federal government’s contribution toward the program.

"This Positive Train Control project will lead to safer and faster train transportation in the new century and new millennium," said Secretary Slater. "It supports President Clinton and Vice President Gore’s commitment to improved transportation safety, increased mobility for all Americans and continued economic growth."

The contract award is being made through the North American Joint Positive Train Control Program (NAJPTC), a partnership between Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), Illinois Department of Transportation (ILDOT) and the Association of American Railroads (AAR). The primary objective of NAJPTC is to demonstrate a cost-effective PTC system, which is one of the technologies that will further improve railroad safety and enable the development of high-speed rail in the Midwest and elsewhere in the United States. Approximately half of the funding for the project comes from the federal government.

PTC systems utilize intelligent transportation technologies including onboard computers, digital radio links, differential global positioning systems, computer route databases, and wayside computer control systems to assure that train operations are safe. Train control systems such as PTC are mandatory under federal regulations wherever train speeds exceed 79 mph. Among the safety benefits of such systems are the prevention of train collision, overspeed accidents and the protection of track and signal maintenance workers. PTC technology will also aid Amtrak in developing high-speed rail service across the country.

In recent years, according to the FRA, railroads have achieved unprecedented safety records. This has been accomplished through partnerships among the FRA, rail management and rail labor working together to identify and remedy systemic safety issues. PTC systems are designed to aid the human operators of today’s system in preventing accidents while also increasing the capacity of the railroad network for both freight and passenger trains.

"This award reflects the Clinton-Gore Administration’s commitment to high-speed rail passenger service," said FRA Administrator Jolene M. Molitoris. "PTC will help ease airport and highway congestion by providing a safe, reliable, comfortable and environmentally-friendly transportation option which supports the President and Vice President’s livability agenda."

The system to be installed in Illinois will enable the Union Pacific Railroad control center in Omaha, Neb. to monitor the real time locations of trains. When dispatchers authorize train movements over specific routes, computers will assure that operations are safe and will issue movement instructions to the trains over the digital radio network. A computer on each locomotive will display the permitted movements to the locomotive engineer and will stop a train if operations contrary to the dispatcher’s plan are attempted.

The NAJPTC Project is intended to establish industry interoperability standards which will govern how the railroads work with each other as new PTC systems are deployed. The Lockheed Martin team includes Wabtec of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Union Switch and Signal of Swissvale, Pa., and Parsons Brinkerhoff of Chicago.