Last December, an Amtrak passenger train was on its inaugural run south of Tacoma, Washington. The train was traveling 78 mph through a curved 30 mph zone when it jumped the track, flipped over a bridge and landed below.

Three passengers and crew members died, and 62 others were injured. They might have been spared if a safety system called positive train control was in place, stopping the train before it derailed.

Rick McGavock, an engineer living in Columbia, was instrumental in developing the technology behind the positive train control system. His work has helped railroads avoid accidents and save lives.

But during the December crash, the control system was not in service.

Rick McGavock’s changed from a job with 3M to a railroad industry career After getting laid off from 3M in 2002, Rick McGavock’s “life got thrown for a loop” causing him to move to Florida where his work in the railroad industry began. He began his career in the railroad industry, doing everything from programing and testing automated train safety programs to teaching up-and-coming railroad technicians how to use the technology he helped build. Fifteen years later, the software he wrote is still used for the majority of railroad crossings in the U.S. Now McGavock works out of a home office located in Columbia.

Stopping the brake

Ten years ago, Congress mandated the adoption of positive train control as a way to reduce human error in train mishaps. The system stops trains from colliding if a train is going too fast, if an engineer runs a red light or if someone forgets to move a switch to the right position.

McGavock designed the software that runs the event recorder, or black box, for railroads. Working off cell towers, the event recorder collects data at nearly every railroad crossing in the country. If trouble occurs, the data is automatically relayed through a communication network so the problem can be monitored.

Rick’s McGavock’s home has a room solely dedicated to railroad crossing equipment Rick McGavock’s home has a room solely dedicated to railroad crossing equipment. This equipment is a working replica of real equipment not in use, but is used for testing new technology, educational events and other public presentations. “Each of these modules connects to the tracks” electronically and “starts the gate down, starts the bell ringing, starts the light flashing. It’s the brain,” said McGavock. The digital infrastructure used by positive train control never existed before “we had to create all that data…from the ground up,” McGavock said.

The entire network connects locomotives, dispatchers and signals along the track. The system knows where a train is located at all times, how fast it is going and whether danger lies ahead. If a problem occurs and an engineer doesn’t notice, the control system can hit the brakes.

Its like having a system of workers all talking to each other and making sure the train is moving along the track safely, McGavock said, except now its automatic.

Its just a massive system, and it had to be built from the ground up, he said.

Had positive train control been installed in the 2017 Tacoma crash, the system would have sensed that the train was going nearly 50 mph over the speed limit and told the driver to slow down.

If the driver didnt listen and the train was in danger, the system would have activated the emergency brakes, sending a simultaneous clamp through the length of the train, stopping it and preventing the deadly crash.

Preventing accidents

Positive train control could have prevented many of the catastrophic train crashes in the last 50 years. Had the system been available and widely adopted in 1969, it could have prevented 145 rail accidents that killed 288 people and injured 6,574, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

It was the Chatsworth train collision in 2008 in California that proved the tipping point. After 25 were killed and another 135 injured when two trains collided near Los Angeles, the railroad industry began a serious push to implement the positive train control system.

“The collision would not have occurred had the safety system been in place, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded.

On Oct. 16, 2008, President George W. Bush signed into law the Rail Safety Improvement Act, which required railroads to implement positive train control in all major passenger and freight rail networks.

Brian Farrow and Missy Grimes wait for a 7:30 p.m. train heading to St. Louis Brian Farrow and Missy Grimes wait for a 7:30 p.m. train heading to St. Louis on Thursday at the station in Jefferson City. “We were just in Iberia visiting family for three days,” Farrow said. “We try to come down every couple months, but it’s hard sometimes with scheduling.”

The act required the system to be installed in every passenger and freight train by 2015. Three years later, when that deadline was not met, Congress extended it to December 2018.

In fact, BNSF Railway, which serves the western half of the country, is still the only Class 1 railroad with full use of the positive train control system. Other major railroads CSX Transport, Norfolk Southern Railways, Kansas City Southern Railway and Union Pacific railroad range from 80 percent to 100 percent completion. Amtrak has also complied, but the network commuter railroads still lag behind.

“Many of us remain concerned that some railroads havent lived up to their end of the bargain to meet the 2018 deadline, said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, ranking member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

Meeting deadlines

One reason railroads are still in noncompliance is cost. Since 2008, the Federal Railroad Administration has awarded about $961 million in grant funds to support railroads implementation, said the agency administrator, Ronald Batory.

Initially, however, the General Accounting Office estimated the cost of installing the system in all trains at a cost of $6.7 billion to $22.5 billion.

People board a train heading to St. Louis from Jefferson City People board a train heading to St. Louis from Jefferson City.

Another problem is the complicated web of train and railroad ownership. Each railway has its own version of positive train control, and systems need to work together for the safety network to work. A train using Norfolk Southern rails on the East Coast, for example, might run into communication problems when switching to Union Pacific tracks in the West.

“One of the most critical steps is trying to figure out how to make all these different but similar systems interact with each other,” McGavock said.

“That’s kind of the final piece of the puzzle. Making sure everyone played nice with each other.”

Local leadership

McGavock’s involvement with the positive train control system was serendipitous.

In 2002, he was laid off by Columbias 3M company, moved to Jacksonville, Florida, and lived with a roommate who worked for a vendor that created event recorders for train crossings. The company was called Safetran, later acquired by Siemens, the huge German-based technology company.

McGavocks background in technology and electronics got him a job with Safetran. His breakthrough came when his boss drew a series of boxes representing an automated event recorder and told him to make it.

When a train has an event recorder, or black box, it’s as if an engineer were watching every action and taking meticulous notes.

If anything seems amiss, the recorder takes the information, packages it and sends it to a mainframe computer to be analyzed. The analysis detects problems that are then sent to local maintenance to fix them.

McGavock taught himself how to build the software used on those event recorders, and today, the event recorders are found in most railroad crossings throughout the country. The software he wrote and tested is an integral part of the system that identifies potential train mishaps.

Jan Whitehead calls a friend to pick her up after a train from St. Louis Jan Whitehead calls a friend to pick her up after taking a train from St. Louis to the station in Jefferson City on Thursday. She says it’s faster and easier compared to driving.

In 2013, McGavock got an offer from Siemens to return as a consulting engineer. He accepted the offer on the condition that he could move back to my hometown of Columbia where there are no trains.

McGavock now mostly works out of his home office. He answers technical support questions for the Siemens rail products he helped conceive, trains new engineers and advises on products designed for train engineers.

One project he’s pursuing uses augmented reality as a tool to help maintenance crews work on unfamiliar equipment while wearing Google glasses, for example.

Thats kind of the fun of my job. The boss lets me take these crazy ideas and just run with them sometimes.