Sen. Chuck Schumer tried to light a fire under the MTA on Sunday to meet a crucial deadline to install safety equipment designed to prevent deadly rail crashes.

Schumer said the transportation agency is close to blowing a 2018 deadline to install the system, known as Positive Train Control, even though the project has gotten a boost with federal funding.

“We’ve gotten a billion dollars from Washington so that the MTA can implement PTC,” Schumer said at his weekly press conference. “Unfortunately, [the MTA] just announced that they are going to delay implementation.”

Positive Train Control is designed to slow and eventually stop trains which are traveling above posted speed limits – technology that likely would have prevented the crash in 2015 that killed eight aboard an Amtrak train in Philadelphia, as well as the Metro-North derailment in Valhalla that same year that left six people dead, experts have said.

“I saw gruesome, burnt-out railroad cars, and it breaks your heart to think that people died and many others injured when they didn’t have to be,” Schumer said of such incidents.

According to the senator, the MTA’s work on Positive Train Control should have been completed in 2015 but the MTA asked for a three-year extension.

“Now they’re saying that they need more time, and that is unacceptable,” Schumer said. “I am asking the MTA today to meet the deadline because positive train control is a life-saver.

“If people don’t think the rails are safe, they’re going to stop riding them. And that will be a huge problem for the New York metropolitan area, for the people on the road.”

The MTA responded Sunday by saying its customers’ and employees’ safety are “absolute top priority.

“MTA is moving aggressively to install Positive Train Control on our railroads — and is a leader in system safety, including with automatic train speed enforcement at curves and movable bridges, devices in all train cabs to ensure engineers are alert, a confidential safety reporting system for employees to report any issue, a best-in-the-nation sleep apnea screening program and Metro-North’s award-winning enhanced employee protection system,” the agency said in a statement.