The failures of FRA are on the Obama Administration, who allowed this to become a slop trough bloated system architecture process for favored vendors proprietary systems, and who never pressed the critical communication issues within the Administration, or with the FCC.

So despite may very low opinion of the current delusional clown in the White House, it is the last Administration that really failed to follow through on many of these kind of initiatives, sort of on "auto-pilot", without leadership or accountability for the PTC requirements and needs.

So with that indictment of Obama's FRA and FCC, the idiots who excuse failure based on ideological purity of their beliefs can flame away at me on that one, just like the morons I like those I seem offend on the other goofball ideological fringe, when they peddle their brand of delusional ideological fairy tales.

The lack of vision, leadership, adequate qualified staffing, and proper oversight at FRA, on both PTC, and with the new rail funding programs, is why many of these projects have taken so long to get under contract and complete.

Yes, Congress can be faulted for inadequate funding and unfunded mandates, both the Dems and Reps, but that is why most of the capital rail funding now comes from the states, and has, in States like CA and Wash, for years now.

Congress has been a joke on Federal infrastructure funding since the time of Johnson and Eisenhower, nothing really new there. We still have the best Congress that money can buy.... And, I'm just shocked!

But, that was not the source of the recent problems with PTC implementation.... The industry itself, its vendors, and the FRA almost went out of there way to assure this would be more costly and take much longer than necessary..... Or as they like to say in "gubmint" failures like these one: "Heckuva job!"

The BN experience is typical of backward corporate culture of much of the RR management I worked for, and as we witnessed from "leading lights" like Hunter Harrison. Amd, as this article rightly notes, is yet another big part of the problem..... After all, if you're really about milking the capital out of an 1890's business model, why would you waste time and money to invest in modern new fangled technologies that would make things more efficient and safer......