FCC: Railroads Mostly Have Needed PTC Spectrum

In a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on rail safety, Charles Mathias, associate bureau chief of the Federal Communications Commission's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, said that the FCC believed the railroads either had or were close to getting the spectrum they need to implement positive train control technologies, but that interference, train-to-train and train-to-TV station, continued to be a potential problem. DJ Stadtler, executive VP and COO of Amtrak, testified that access to spectrum had been one of the factors delaying implementation. "Amtrak attempted to purchase the necessary bandwidth on the open market, but the acquisition proved to be a challenging and time consuming process, and our several requests to the FCC for a bandwidth allocation out of its inventory were not accepted."

Mathias said that "even in the Northeast Corridor, we think that they do have the spectrum, or are certainly close to getting it." He said the FCC has been in talks with Amtrak officials over the past two weeks and was committed to finding them additional spectrum if it was needed. He pointed out that the 2008 legislation prompting PTC did not designate spectrum for it or direct the FCC to allocate it, so the FCC encouraged railroads to look to secondary markets, including for the Northeast Corridor, though he conceded that since no money was allocated for Congress for those purchases, that it is "challenging."