advertisement

---

New Jersey Transit Corp.’s board of directors Feb. 13 awarded Union Switch & Signal Inc. a $25.7 million contract to complete Phase III of the corporation’s Positive Train Stop (PTS) system. This contract brings US&S’s total contract award to $42.3 million for the project.



The state-wide rail transportation system since August 1997 has been working to combine automatic train control (ATC) with PTS in its Advanced Speed Enforcement System (ASES).



The ATC system sends electrical impulses in the rail through the train’s computer and to the engineer. It enforces appropriate train speed and protects against broken rail or an improperly thrown switch by advising the engineer, and prevents trains from passing through stop signals at 20 mph or above.



PTS uses transponders placed along the wayside to send signals to the train’s computer, which in turn provides the information to the engineer. If the engineer doesn’t respond appropriately, the system is designed to automatically slow or stop a train before a stop signal. It also would enforce speed restrictions on curves where workers would be maintaining rail.



In the first two phases of the project, NJ Transit installed PTS on its 23-mile Pascack Valley Line, ATC on 82 percent of track it owns, combined ASES on the Boonton Line and Morristown Line, and retrofitted 98 of 109 cab cars, locomotives and Arrow III Multiple Unit rail cars to provide ASES signal displays for engineers.



In Phase III, workers are scheduled to install PTS on the remainder of all NJ Transit-owned lines by 2008, perform the remainder of the work on the Main and Boonton lines in 2002 and Pascack Valley Line in 2004, complete installation of the combined ASES system on all NJ Transit-owned right of way by 2008, and finish fitting the remaining 11 rail cars with signal displays by December 2002.