CHICAGO — Amtrak departures from Chicago began at mid-morning today (Sunday, March 26) following two days of widespread cancellations because engineers couldn’t register, or initialize, trains in the interoperable positive train control system shared with host railroads.
The impact of those cancellations will reverberate for days because equipment isn’t available to return to Chicago. Today’s westbound Cardinal, Lake Shore Limited, and Capitol Limited from the East Coast, northbound City of New Orleans, and eastbound Empire Builder were all canceled. Also not running will be Monday’s eastbound Builder, Southwest Chief, and northbound Texas Eagle and the eastbound California Zephyr departing Emeryville, Calif., on Tuesday.
The reason why PTC initialization data wasn’t getting through between Amtrak’s server and the host railroads — and took more than two days to correct — is still being investigated. But several sources tell Trains News Wire that the outage primarily affected Chicago, because that’s where Amtrak transmits PTC information through one conduit into a complicated network shared among many railroads.
Another significant factor is that as of Jan. 1, 2023, the Federal Railroad Administration advised operators it would enforce a regulation that prohibits trains from leaving their originating terminals without being initialized. As part of the PTC implementation process prior to that date, host railroad dispatchers were allowed at their discretion to permit trains to depart without initialization. That prerogative still exists, but only if a train is en route and in the system.
Initialization was able to take place intermittently outside of Chicago because there was less data flowing into the interoperable PTC network at other locations. Though not yet confirmed by Amtrak, it appears the company did not proactively cancel trains in the hope that the server issue was close to being solved.
When that didn’t happen, passengers who had been told earlier Saturday that their train would depart suddenly became stranded at Chicago Union Station.
Sam and Denise Vaughan arrived on the California Zephyr from Reno on Friday, hoping to connect to Kalamazoo, Mich. Barbara Shane was accommodated on a bus from St. Louis when her train was cancelled Saturday, as was the Blue Water to Flint, Mich.
Amtrak accommodated both parties in hotels.
“They put us up Friday night in the Swissotel and Saturday in the Springhill Suites — Amtrak took care of us,” Denise Vaughan tells News Wire. “We tried to rent a car, but all the one-way rentals were sold out,” she adds.
The Vaughans and Shane joined others in a long line Sunday at Union Station, where only two agents were available to attempt to rebook the many passengers seeking to continue their journeys.
The PTC problem was initially detected on Thursday, became widespread on Friday, and continued in full force on Saturday [see “Server issues continue to disrupt Amtrak operations,” News Wire, March 25, 2023]. In addition to the long-distance trains mentioned above, at least 15 Midwest regional trains were canceled today before the problem was resolved [see “Amtrak PTC server meltdown continues,” News Wire, March 26, 2023].
I see our government in the USA proving we can mismanage trains worse than in World War I. We can call it computer aided malfunction.
Its time we realize that Amtrak management in its current form is simply unable to run a passenger railroad.
Its time to find people who can get the job done, or just forget about trying to run trains.
The last sentence in the third paragraph describes what we in the IT field call a SPOF – Single Point of Failure. Absolutely avoidable and completely unacceptable in modern IT infrastructure; exponentially more so for a safety critical system such as PTC. Unbelievable.
Per James response: PTC must have an operable back up system, maybe at reduced speeds, but redundancy should be mandatory. And it seems to already exist.
Amazing that no one can figure out how to drive a train on CNR’s mile-long bypass around downtown Battle Creek.
Ukraine’s railroads continue to carry passengers, weapons and grain under conditions of all-out war. We can’t run a train for one mile.
So, you have an operable signal system that administrative dictators from Big Government says is no longer good enough when problems arise.
Funny how civilized countries with much bigger governments all run trains better than Amtrak ever did.
(Countries like, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Japan, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Norway…)
Perhaps you have it backward.
That is NOT an issue with the server, that’s a data trunk line issue!