Concerns raised about Metro train control system on new rail line Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff, in a letter to local officials, said he was troubled by a contractor's failure to obtain approval for the changes to what is known as the automatic train control system. The controls serve the same function as those that failed in the fatal 2009 Red Line crash, and the contractor is the same company that manufactured the Red Line controls. In his letter, obtained by The Washington Post, Rogoff said the contractor, Alstom Signaling, "unilaterally made various design changes to the [automatic train control system] without prior approval" from Metro or the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. The letter, dated May 17, was sent to Jack Potter, president and chief executive of the airports authority, which is overseeing construction of the rail extension to Dulles. Rogoff wrote that the changes were "alarming," given that the National Transportation Safety Board found that a failure of track circuit equipment built by what is now Alstom Signaling was one of the causes of the Red Line crash, which killed nine people and injured dozens more. Alstom Signaling, a subsidiary of the French infrastructure giant Alstom, was known as General Railway Signal Co. before it was acquired in 1998. "The scrutiny of the ATC system following the accident," Rogoff wrote "should have strengthened GRS/Alstom's practices - not weakened them." The first phase of Metro's Silver Line, one of the largest public transportation projects in the country, is under construction and is expected to be ready for passengers late this year or early next year. Dulles Transit Partners, led by the international construction and engineering giant Bechtel, is building the first leg of the rail extension, an 11-mile stretch from East Falls Church to Reston. The situation that prompted Rogoff's letter arose because of a shortage of electronic control boards that help transmit signals along the rail line to trains, according to three officials with oversight roles. In the course of testing, Alstom workers allegedly moved some control boards from one monitoring station to another, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. As a result, one of the officials said, the workers "were checking the same set of boards over and over again." When oversight personnel began examining the testing problems, they found that Alstom also had made design changes without approval. The problems were detected by an oversight team that includes Metro and MWAA employees, according to Pat Nowakowski, executive director of the Silver Line project for the airports authority. Potter, the MWAA president, said the oversight worked the way it was intended to.