New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority board committees on April 28 approved the expansion of a contract with a joint venture of Bombardier Transportation-Siemens Rail Automation by an additional $11.3 million.
The Bombardier-Siemens joint venture is serving as the MTA's positive train control system integrator under a $429 million contract awarded in November.
The full board will consider the amendment on April 30.
Positive train control is designed to enhance existing train dispatching and signaling systems by automatically enforcing temporary and permanent speed restrictions and automatically stopping trains at red signals.
Critics of the MTA said that such a system could have avoided the Dec. 1 Metro-North Railroad accident in the Bronx that killed four people and injured about 70 others.
According to MTA chairman Thomas Prendergast, the system aims to eliminate the risk of accidents from train-vs.-train collisions or derailments resulting from excessive speed around curves.
In the December accident, the Hudson line train derailed off a sharp curve near Spuyten Duyvil station. The Federal Railroad Administration in March accused Metro-North of overemphasizing on-time performance at the expense of safety.
"We support this technology and we want our customers to begin benefiting from it sooner rather than later," Prendergast said in a statement.
The amended contract would expedite by up to nearly two years the retrofitting of 836 Long Island Rail Road and 474 Metro-North rail cars to enable them for send and receive positive train control signals. Those retrofits will now be completed by April 2017, Prendergast said.
