Iraqi Railroads

Let’s take a quick look at what happened to railroads in Iraq after the U.S. invasion of 2003. Railroad employees are assassinated and major communications and signaling equipment gets looted along its 1,900 kilometers of tracks. Tons of copper wire have been stripped out of the railroad signaling system, and radio and electronic signal equipment has been stolen, rendering safety systems useless. What is the point of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new equipment that would almost certainly be ripped off as quickly as it was put up. The solution? Develop a system so small, independent of wires, and cheap that it would not tempt thieves ─ but still work. Wabtec Railway Electronics, based in central Iowa, has come up with such a system at the low cost of $17 million, a small fraction of a similarly sized U.S.-style traffic-control system.

Basically, each locomotive is being fitted with a small computer linked by satellite and VHF radio to the dispatching office in Baghdad. There will be no color-light signals along the tracks to steal. The dispatcher will be able to give only one train clearance to travel between any two stations. Once the train is in the block between the two stations, the dispatcher cannot clear any other train onto the track until after the train arrives in the next station. Any train that tries to enter the block will automatically receive an air brake command and grind to a halt. For trains that do have clearance, the system will enforce speed limits all along the way with automatic brake commands if an engineer is going too fast.

In America, the Federal Railroad Administration will not approve such an “on the cheap” system for use there without an exhaustive and expensive analysis to prove that it is at least as safe as other systems ─ something smaller U.S. railroads cannot afford.

Fortunately, Iraq is not bound by U.S. bureaucratic regulations. Mafeks International, a U.S.-Turkish joint venture, is the prime contractor and is providing logistical support and helping train some Iraqi railroad employees in its use. Railroaders in Iraq are just like railroaders in America and China. They just want to run trains and go home at night. Isn’t this the track America should be patiently getting the rest of a partitioned country on? Patience, perseverance ─ not a premature American withdrawal with chaos left in its wake.