advertisement

---

With more than 40 U.S. railroads set to spend $10 billion-plus by 2015’s end to comply with the federal positive train control (PTC) mandate, GE Transportation has taken a step toward winning a larger chunk of the railroads’ PTC business.

Today, GE announced it’s teamed up with wireless systems deployment and support firm TESSCO Technologies Inc. to offer PTC solutions to the North American rail industry. Under a long-term partnership, GE and TESSCO plan to co-produce and market integrated, turnkey PTC and monitoring systems.

GE will provide its signaling solutions and expertise; TESSCO will contribute its communication and radio frequency (RF) technology. TESSCO’s power and RF propagation station would provide PTC infrastructure for GE’s controller and radio to monitor oncoming locomotives to help prevent train-to-train collisions, over-speed derailments, work-zone limit violations and train movements through improperly aligned switches.

The integrated system will address U.S. railroads’ need to implement PTC in more than 7,000 dark territory switch locations, which are not monitored by a signal system, GE and TESSCO officials said in a joint statement.