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Rail Safety Improvement Act Of 2008
The Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 is a United States federal law, enacted by Congress to improve railroad safety. Among its provisions, the most notable was the mandate requiring positive train control (PTC) technology to be installed on most of the US railroad network by 2015. This was spurred by the 2008 Chatsworth train collision the month prior to passage of the act. After two delays, the technology was operational on all required railroads by the end of 2020. Background Starting in 1990, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) counted PTC among its "Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements."National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Washington, DC (2010)"Modifications to NTSB Most Wanted List; List of Transportation Safety Improvements after September 1990."/ref> At the time, the vast majority of rail lines relied on the human crew for complying with all safety rules, and a significant fraction of accidents were attributable to human error. ...
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Title 49 Of The United States Code
Title 49 of the United States Code is a positive law title of the United States Code with the heading "Transportation." The title was enacted into positive law by , § 1, October 17, 1978, ; , § 1, January 12, 1983, ; and , July 5, 1994, (subtitles II, III, and V-X) During the time between when the Title 49 positive law codification began in 1978 and when it was completed in 1994, the remaining non-positive law sections were placed in an appendix to Title 49. In 1995, the ICC Termination Act, substantively and significantly amended Title 49. In 2010, Congress enacted Title 51 as a new positive law title concerning NASA and commercial space programs. As part of the codification, the heading of Subtitle IX was marked "transferred" and the contents of such subtitle were moved to Title 51. Five years later, the FAST Act inserted a new Subtitle IX. The heading of new Subtitle IX was given the heading "Multimodal Freight Transportation."Fixing America's Surface Transportatio ...
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United States Department Of Transportation
The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT or DOT) is one of the executive departments of the U.S. federal government. It is headed by the secretary of transportation, who reports directly to the President of the United States and is a member of the president's Cabinet. The department's mission is "to develop and coordinate policies that will provide an efficient and economical national transportation system, with due regard for need, the environment, and the national defense." History Prior to the creation of the Department of Transportation, its functions were administered by the under secretary of commerce for transportation. In 1965, Najeeb Halaby, administrator of the Federal Aviation Agency (predecessor to the Federal Aviation Administration, FAA), suggested to President Lyndon B. Johnson that transportation be elevated to a cabinet-level post, and that the FAA be folded into the DOT. It was established by Congress in the Department of Transportation Act ...
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United States Railroad Regulation
Rail transportation in the United States consists primarily of freight shipments, with a well integrated network of standard gauge private freight railroads extending into Canada and Mexico. Passenger service is mainly mass transit and commuter rail in major cities. Intercity passenger service, once a large and vital part of the nation's passenger transportation network, plays a limited role as compared to transportation patterns in many other countries. The United States has the largest rail transport network size of any country in the world. The nation's earliest railroads were built in the 1820s and 1830s, primarily in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, chartered in 1827, was the nation's first common carrier railroad. By 1850, an extensive railroad network had begun to take shape in the rapidly industrializing Northeastern United States and the Midwest, while relatively fewer railroads were constructed in the primarily agricultural ...
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Railway Safety
Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport that transfers passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, which are incorporated in tracks. In contrast to road transport, where the vehicles run on a prepared flat surface, rail vehicles (rolling stock) are directionally guided by the tracks on which they run. Tracks usually consist of steel rails, installed on sleepers (ties) set in ballast, on which the rolling stock, usually fitted with metal wheels, moves. Other variations are also possible, such as "slab track", in which the rails are fastened to a concrete foundation resting on a prepared subsurface. Rolling stock in a rail transport system generally encounters lower frictional resistance than rubber-tyred road vehicles, so passenger and freight cars (carriages and wagons) can be coupled into longer trains. The operation is carried out by a railway company, providing transport between train stations or freight customer facilit ...
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Department Of Transportation V
Department may refer to: * Departmentalization, division of a larger organization into parts with specific responsibility Government and military *Department (administrative division), a geographical and administrative division within a country, for example: **Departments of Colombia, a grouping of municipalities **Departments of France, administrative divisions three levels below the national government **Departments of Honduras **Departments of Peru, name given to the subdivisions of Peru until 2002 **Departments of Uruguay *Department (United States Army), corps areas of the U.S. Army prior to World War I *Fire department, a public or private organization that provides emergency firefighting and rescue services *Ministry (government department), a specialized division of a government *Police department, a body empowered by the state to enforce the law * Department (naval) administrative/functional sub-unit of a ship's company. Other uses * ''Department'' (film), a 2012 Bollywoo ...
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Transportation Safety In The United States
Transportation safety in the United States encompasses safety of transportation in the United States, including Traffic collision, automobile crashes, Aviation accidents and incidents, airplane crashes, Train wreck, rail crashes, and other mass transit incidents, although the most fatalities are generated by road incidents yearly killing from 32,479 to nearly 38,680 (+%) in the last decade. The number of deaths per passenger-mile on commercial airlines in the United States between 2000 and 2010 was about 0.2 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles. For driving, the rate was 150 per 10 billion vehicle-miles: 750 times higher per mile than for flying in a commercial airplane. The U.S. government's National Center for Health Statistics reported 33,736 motor vehicle traffic deaths in 2014. This exceeded the number of firearm deaths, which was 33,599 in 2014. According to another U.S. government office, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), motor vehicle crashes ...
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North American Railway Signalling
Standards for North American railroad signaling in the United States are issued by the Association of American Railroads (AAR), which is a trade association of the railroads of Canada, the US, and Mexico. Their system is loosely based on practices developed in the United Kingdom during the early years of railway development. However, North American practice diverged from that of the United Kingdom due to different operating conditions and economic factors between the two regions. In Canada, the Canadian Rail Operating Rules (CROR) are approved by the Minister of Transport under the authority of the Railway Safety Act. Each railway company or transit authority in Canada issues its own CROR rulebook with special instructions peculiar to each individual property. Among the distinctions are: * The US has a much longer history of power operation of switches ("points" in UK parlance) and signals. * The US and Canada departed from UK practice wherein a semaphore blade is devoted to eac ...
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Dark Territory
Dark territory is a term used in the North American railroad industry to describe a section of running track not controlled by signals. Train movements in dark territory were previously handled by timetable and train order operation, but since the widespread adoption of two way radio communications these have been replaced by track warrants and direct traffic control, with train dispatchers managing train movements directly. Today most dark territory consists of lightly used secondary branch lines and industrial tracks with speeds ranging between and ; however, there do exist a small minority of main lines that fall into the category. In the UK and Australia the term applies to rail track where the signalling system does not pass the signal indications nor track occupancy back to a signal box. As such the position of trains is not visible to signallers, and so the track is "dark". Safety concerns The primary safety concerns with dark territory stems from the lack of any form of ...
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The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large national audience. Daily broadsheet editions are printed for D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. The ''Post'' was founded in 1877. In its early years, it went through several owners and struggled both financially and editorially. Financier Eugene Meyer purchased it out of bankruptcy in 1933 and revived its health and reputation, work continued by his successors Katharine and Phil Graham (Meyer's daughter and son-in-law), who bought out several rival publications. The ''Post'' 1971 printing of the Pentagon Papers helped spur opposition to the Vietnam War. Subsequently, in the best-known episode in the newspaper's history, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the American press's investigation into what became known as the Watergate scandal ...
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Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004, and previously worked as a civil rights lawyer before entering politics. Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, he worked as a community organizer in Chicago. In 1988, he enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the '' Harvard Law Review''. After graduating, he became a civil rights attorney and an academic, teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Turning to elective politics, he represented the 13th district in the Illinois Senate from 1997 until 2004, when he ran for the U ...
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Commuter Railroads
Commuter rail services in the United States, Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Costa Rica provide common carrier passenger transportation along railway tracks, with scheduled service on fixed routes on a non-reservation basis, primarily for short-distance (local) travel between a central business district and adjacent suburbs and regional travel between cities of a conurbation. It does ''not'' include rapid transit or light rail service. Services Many, but not all, newer commuter railways offer service during peak times only, with trains into the central business district during morning rush hour and returning to the outer areas during the evening rush hour. This mode of operation is, in many cases, simplified by ending the train with a special passenger carriage (referred to as a cab car), which has an operating cab and can control the locomotive remotely, to avoid having to turn the train around at each end of its route. Other systems avoid the problem entirely by using bi-di ...
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Class I Railroad
In the United States, railroad carriers are designated as Class I, II, or III, according to annual revenue criteria originally set by the Surface Transportation Board in 1992. With annual adjustments for inflation, the 2019 thresholds were US$504,803,294 for Class I carriers and US$40,384,263 for Class II carriers. (Smaller carriers were Class III by default.) There are seven Class I freight railroad companies in the United States including two Canadian carriers with subsidiary trackage in the United States: BNSF Railway, Canadian National Railway (via its subsidiary Grand Trunk Corporation), Canadian Pacific Railway (via its subsidiary Soo Line Corporation), CSX Transportation, Kansas City Southern Railway, Norfolk Southern Railway, and Union Pacific Railroad. (Mexico's Ferromex and Kansas City Southern de México would qualify as Class I, but do not operate within the United States.) In addition, the national passenger railroad in the United States, Amtrak, would qualif ...
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