As you know, that was mandated by the U.S. Congress with the Rail Safety Improvement Act passed on October 16, 2008. All the class 1 railways that transport more than five million gross tonnes, as well as transporting what they call poison-by-inhalation and toxic-by-inhalation material, as well as commuter rail and inter-passenger rail, had to implement PTC by December 30, 2015.
However, PTC is a very good system if you have a captive service with one company on your own network. It becomes an issue when you have to be interoperable with other railways. PTC in the States will cover about 41 railways and 60,000 miles of track. As we speak right now, there are several systems that have been developed and they're not talking to each other; therefore, the U.S. railways feel they're not going to be ready by that date and they're asking for an extension of five years.
Since many railways are trying to get PTC in the States right now, there's a lack of resources in terms of people available to work on the technology. The cost is extremely high. The cost-benefit ratio is 21:1, so $1 saved for $21 invested in PTC.
We're following it very closely. We have people on the committees out there. I'm on committees as well. We also met the technology provider, Wabtec, which provides ETCS to the five class 1 railways out there. Their recommendation to us is to wait until it's fully implemented in the States and they've worked out all the bugs. Then we may have something like a turnkey operation if we ever want to implement that technology in Canada.
It's the same thing in Europe. They have a system called ETCS that has been in place for about 30 years. Twenty years ago they launched—