June 2018

26 27 it reduces approximately nine million car trips a year from southern California’s congested freeways, while eliminating 110,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases, annually. “Twenty-five or thirty years ago, when I was growing up here, nobody could have imagined the magnitude of the growth here, or the need to have a commuter railroad,” he says. “But that’s all changed. People here now realize that, on a global scale, it’s on a par with New York, and big- ger than Chicago, Philadelphia, and Bos- ton. So we have to have the things that big cities need. The freeways are basically done. They’re not going to be expanded or widened. So, what we face here is a growing population which is spreading out because of the high cost of housing in the central area, and we have freeways with fixed capacity. That means that as time goes on, the freeways are going to become more and more congested. So, the only practical way to relieve the freeways in southern California is Metrolink.” In a further move to help clean up southern California’s air, Metrolink has begun replacing its aging fleet with state- of-the-art, Tier 4 locomotives – the clean- est diesel locomotives in the world. Tier 4 locomotives are compliant with the latest U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emissions standards and will reduce particulate matter and nitrogen oxide METROLINK emissions by up to 85 percent, while providing 57 percent more horsepower. Metrolink’s Tier 4 locomotives are also equipped with Positive Train Control (PTC) and Crash Energy Manage- ment (CEM), which absorbs energy in the event of a collision. In fact, Metrolink was the first passenger rail in the nation to incorporate the life-saving PTC, a GPS-based safety technology that can stop a train and prevent train-to-train colli- sions, over-speed derailments, and unautho- rized train movement. Metrolink’s PTC system combines GPS, wireless radio, and computing technology to send up-to-date visual and au- dible information to notify train crew members when a train must be slowed or stopped. If an engineer does not respond to the PTC warning system, onboard computers will activate the brakes and safely stop the train. PTC ensures the safety of passengers by acting as a safe- guard against human errors and other poten- tial hazards. “The PTC system will identify if a train is going too fast and bring it to a slower speed, or even stop it,” says Leahy. “It can also detect if there’s another train up ahead, somewhere, and it will make sure it stops the trains be- fore there’s a collision.We’re one of the first in the country to get PTC to work and we’re really proud of that. That’s taken some effort over the past eight or nine years.” In addition, while Metrolink has installed PTC on all of its tracks, Leahy says that it is also working with Burlington Northern and Union Pacific to have an integrated PTC operation on the tracks that they own and share with Metrolink. Another safety-related and efficiency issue that Leahy says Metrolink is tackling includes upgrading the system’s single track lines to double or triple-tracking, wherever possible. “Right now, we have a lot of single tracking on our major rail lines and, as a consequence, we can only run at a certain frequency,” he ex- plains. “Plus, when something goes wrong, the