I suspect that a number of Class I railroads were thrilled to see that Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R – Texas) introduced a bill that rectifies one of the more curious (some would say egregious) aspects of the PTC regulations.  The law passed by Congress simply requires that PTC should be installed on lines handling passenger trains or certain hazardous materials often referred to as “toxic inhalation hazards” or “TIH.”  As with many Federal laws, it was left to the FRA to specify exactly how these rail lines would be selected.  The industry has long felt that the FRA was completely unreasonable with respect to the TIH rules used to determine which lines needed PTC.

There are two aspects to this issue.  The first is the quantity of TIH traffic that will trigger the requirement, and the second is how this quantity will be determined.  Currently the quantity threshold is set at 100 cars per year.  Note I said cars, not loads, because in most cases the empty cars are included along with the loads.  In effect, this means that any line with more then one load per week requires a full PTC implementation.  Talk about conservative!

But what many railroads consider an even more pernicious aspect of the regulations is that the TIH traffic that traversed each line in 2008 is to be used to determine where PTC must be installed.  While I cannot speak to the rationale behind this rule, it effectively gave the railroads no ability to reroute TIH traffic to reduce the number of rail lines handling this traffic.  Clearly, in the cost trade-off of some increased circuity or use of alternate routes versus having to install PTC on the line for one TIH car per week, railroads are going to seek to reroute some of this traffic.  But the regulations effectively precluded this sensible step.  It is this specific issue that Senator Hutchison’s bill is designed to address by moving the base year forward from 2008 to 2015, and we are sure that many in the industry hope that it will be passed into law.