Chicago-area Rep. Dan Lipinski has a significant cash advantage over his rival in an upcoming Democratic primary, activist Marie Newman. The war chest is thanks, in significant part, to Lipinski’s friendly relationship with the railroad industry.

Nearly one out of every $6 Lipinski raised to accumulate a $1.2 million campaign war chest over the last decade came from rail company PACs, a review of Federal Election Commission reports reveals.

But that relationship has put him at the center of one of the most heated public safety controversies of our time: the railroad industry’s resistance to installing the automatic braking technology known as Positive Train Control. Lipinski helped lead a push in 2015 to delay the requirement that railways install the technology, which experts say will save lives when finally implemented.

Lipinski, one of the most conservative Democrats facing a serious progressive primary challenge this year, won his seat when his father, longtime Rep. William Lipinski, announced his retirement after the 2004 primary — allowing his son to ease his way onto the ballot and effectively face no competition. The senior Lipinski, long backed by the Illinois Democratic machine, went on to become a rail industry lobbyist.

The PTC technology refers to a system of track sensors, satellites, and radio signals used to continuously calculate safe train speeds. The system can automatically slow down or brake a train to avoid a crash or derailment. Experts say the technology could have prevented a number of fatal rail incidents, including an incident last December in which an Amtrak train derailed near Tacoma, Washington, leaving three dead and 62 injured. After each fatal accident, pressure to install the technology grows, lobbyists swarm Capitol Hill, and, as public attention fades, Congress allows the railroad industry to delay installing PTC. Then more people die, and the cycle repeats itself.

Though similar technology is widely deployed in most European countries and much of the advanced industrial world, implementation in the U.S. has been slow. If the U.S. had adopted PTC decades ago, as the National Transportation Safety Board has long recommended, at least 298 deaths and 6,763 injuries could have been prevented, according to an analysis performed by the board.

Congress finally acted to mandate the technology after a major disaster in 2008, when a commuter train in California crashed head on with a freight train, killing 25 people. Investigators found the accident could have been prevented had PTC been installed. The new law mandated PTC installation by the end of 2015, with a penalty of $25,000 per day for lines that failed to meet the requirement.

But private railroad firms and freight companies, which share tracks with commuter rails, balked at the cost of implementing PTC technology and worked aggressively to oppose the mandate. The American Association of Railroads, the leading industry lobby group, mobilized to carve out exemptions and delays for the PTC requirement. The association represents BNSF Railway Company, Canadian Pacific, CSX Transportation, Metra, Amtrak, and other major rail interests.

The American Association of Railroads deployed a bipartisan army of well-connected former lawmakers and safety regulators to storm Capitol Hill and weaken the PTC rules. One of the lobbyists hired to press lawmakers on the requirement was the elder Lipinski. Ethics records show he was registered to lobby directly on safety rules on behalf of the rail industry.

On June 24, 2015, the House Transportation Committee’s railroad subcommittee, on which the younger Lipinski holds a seat, held a hearing on the looming deadline. The rail industry effectively threatened a capital strike, arguing that it had already spent billions of dollars on PTC upgrades, and warned that they would rather shut down entire tracks — bringing economic activity to a halt — instead of paying fines for not implementing PTC by January 1.

“It’s hard to say we haven’t put the best foot forward we possibly could,” said Frank Lonegro, an executive with CSX Transportation, at the hearing, who specifically threatened to shut down passenger train lines around Washington if the mandate wasn’t delayed.

Lipinski agreed that the penalties were onerous and that the industry deserved more time to implement PTC. “We all want to sit up here and fine villains,” Lipinski said. “And this situation, I think, is very complex and there are not easy answers to this.”

(Watch the exchange below. Some browser extensions disable the embedding of video on The Intercept; in that case, view video of it here.)



On September 19, 2015, a number of lawmakers, including Lipinski and other Transportation Committee members, signed a letter urging Congress to consider an extension of the PTC deadline. About a month later, at an event next to the Capitol, Lipinski stood next to Edward Hamberger, the chief lobbyist of the American Association of Railroads, to announce he was leading an effort to pass legislation to provide that extension.