For years, Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey has campaigned to delay a multibillion-dollar railroad safety technology, calling it an “exorbitantly expensive unfunded mandate.”

But safety officials say the technology would have prevented last week’s deadly train crash in Philadelphia. And Democrats argue that the railroads were starved of the money necessary to finish it.


Interviewed two days after the crash, Toomey abandoned some of his budget-cutting bombast of years past. He’s dropped his sponsorship of legislation that would postpone the safety system rollout for several more years. And he says the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority that he was trying to protect from unnecessary spending no longer needs a delay.

Asked whether he thinks there should be any further delay in the positive train control system rollout, Toomey replied: “No.”

“SEPTA has been able to catch up to a very large degree. We helped them get a grant so they can do that. So I’m not concerned,” he said in a Thursday interview.

That’s a different argument from the one Toomey had made earlier. Since the Pennsylvania Republican came to the Senate in 2011, he’s argued that money for the crash prevention system could be better spent on things like rehabbing Pennsylvania’s crumbling bridges. Over the years, he’s written letters to regulators complaining about the system’s high costs, sponsored legislation to delay it and testified at hearings that it’s a misplaced priority.

Though he is a top target in 2016, national Democrats were loath to discuss Toomey’s crusade against the safety system. But Danielle Lynch, a spokeswoman for former Rep. Joe Sestak, a Democrat challenging Toomey in next year’s Senate race, said Toomey’s past fight against PTC “tragically shows the sad struggle by those who oppose what government can do for its citizens” and accused him of a flip-flop.

“When tragedy happens, he quickly calls for needed safety measures,” she said.

The crash has become a flash point between Democrats pushing for more transportation investment and Republicans looking to trim government spending. House Speaker John Boehner said it is “stupid” to link cuts in Amtrak funding to the crash; Democrats called Boehner’s statement nonsense.

“Speaker Boehner doesn’t even understand,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said at a news conference Friday in New York. “Because they come from their little parochial areas, and they don’t understand the need for rail transportation in urban areas.”

For someone like Toomey, who lives an hour from Philadelphia, the crash could force a reexamination of years of opposition to spending money on safety system upgrades.

In 2011, nine months into his Senate tenure, Toomey made a case for delaying implementation of PTC, a GPS-based anti-crash technology. Citing a Government Accountability Office report, Toomey argued then that putting money into the system threatened to draw resources from SEPTA’s crumbling bridges.

“My concern … is that other critical safety needs may go unmet if funding is diverted to paying for PTC,” Toomey said at a Commerce Committee hearing in 2011. “There may be a sensible solution to this problem: a three-year extension to 2018.”

A year later, he wrote a letter to then-Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood about the “exorbitantly expensive unfunded mandate,” calling it duplicative and saying “no extraordinary safety need will be met by rushing toward this implementation date” at the end of 2015.

In September 2013, he helped deliver a DOT grant to SEPTA to help the transportation service finish installing the crash-prevention system. But he remained concerned about the mandate and two months later signed a bipartisan bill that would have delayed PTC’s installation until 2020.

Since the crash, Toomey said he no longer worries about the PTC mandate hurting his local transit system. And he no longer supports inaction, declining to back the latest effort to delay PTC’s rollout.

But he does have questions for Amtrak.

He said it was his impression that Amtrak was almost done installing PTC across its system, so he was surprised to learn that the site of the derailment was missing technology that could have prevented a train from entering a curve at more than twice the 50-mph speed limit and derailing. Toomey insisted he was not trying to force Amtrak to delay the safety upgrades.

“My understanding is that Amtrak is extremely close to having it fully deployed; it actually has been for some time. My interest in delaying it was that Amtrak had it virtually in place, and my concern has been SEPTA,” Toomey said.

Jim Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said lawmakers have long failed to mandate, oversee and fund rail safety, at the cost of many lives.

“For the senator from Pennsylvania to not know that it’s not in place in the center of his city, that’s something he should know and I would certainly think, advocate for,” Hall said.

Congress didn’t require railroads to install PTC until 2008, after a deadly California commuter train-freight rail collision, even though NTSB had been pushing the technology for more than 40 years. Hall said he “spent quite a bit of time” pressuring Congress to take up PTC during his six-year tenure at NTSB, but lawmakers always had a reason to lobby against the system.

“We have had to move from disaster to disaster to see change,” Hall said. “Who knows what their argument will be in seven years, to delay or kick the can down the road again.”

Though Amtrak has vowed to finish PTC installation by the end of this year, NTSB and Amtrak were unequivocal: The technology was not complete on the stretch of rail where the train crashed. But members of Congress, including Toomey, said they believed Amtrak was nearly done installing the safety technology for years.

Asked how to reconcile those two statements, Toomey replied: “That’s not clear. And that’s what I want to understand better.”

Capitol Hill is still sorting through the fallout from the crash, which was immediately followed by House Republicans moving to slash Amtrak’s budget. A bipartisan group of senators set to unveil an Amtrak reform package aimed at reducing funding levels hit pause after the crash.

And in March, the Senate Commerce Committee passed a bill extending the deadline for installing PTC until 2020, a major priority of railroads. Another group of senators, led by California Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, has proposed extending the deadline until 2018 on a case-by-case basis.

Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.) said his committee is trying to figure out “what’s reasonable” in terms of delaying the deadline but plans to forge ahead with some kind of extension.

“It’s going to take the railroads a while to get up and going with it,” Thune told reporters Thursday. “I think it’s not just a function of the money. … There are concerns that if it’s done too quickly, and you don’t have everything working in the right way, that it could create even more potential risks. So it’s got to be done right.”

Toomey is not supporting Thune’s proposal this time as it waits in the queue for the full Senate to take it up.

“I welcome anyone who joins the fight for positive train control,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said when informed of Toomey’s position. “Because I’ve been urging and advocating and imploring that we need it for years. And the delay that was approved by the Commerce Committee is reprehensible and irresponsible. Everyone who rides a railroad is one human error away from an injury or even death.”

In a private party lunch on Thursday, Blumenthal told his Democratic colleagues to get on board with technology rather than continuing to delay it. Two Democrats, Sens. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Commerce Committee ranking member Bill Nelson of Florida, are co-sponsoring the Commerce Committee’s bill this year.

But for safety advocates, the attention toward PTC by both parties on Capitol Hill smacks of reaction rather than policymaking.

“Congress has failed in its oversight responsibilities and its funding responsibilities,” Hall said. “That requires leadership and commitment. Unfortunately, once again, that’s coming at the price of innocent lives.”