The rail industry will have to spend billions of dollars on rail safety projects under a bill expected to become law, and not everyone believes it can - or will - meet its deadlines.

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The bill would bring broad reforms ushered in by a series of high-profile rail accidents. The Senate was expected to vote on the bill last week, a week after it was approved by the House of Representatives. The bill would cap the hours per week rail employees could work, limit "limbo" time and require the adoption of positive train control technology on many rail lines by 2015.

The bill also includes $13 billion for Amtrak over the next five years and money for state and regional rail systems. Amtrak has not been reauthorized since 1997. The bill reauthorizes the Federal Railroad Administration, which has been operating under an expired law since 1998. The last major rail safety legislation was that expired law, the 1994 Federal Railroad Safety Authorization Act.

"We haven't had a rail safety bill with meaningful provisions in more than a generation," said Frank Wilner, a spokesman for the rail worker's United Transportation Union.

He laid the blame squarely on the railroads. "Railroads have previously stopped every attempt at such legislation," Wilner said. The Association of American Railroads denies those claims and says it is supporting the safety legislation "on its merits," said Tom White, an AAR spokesman.

"The reality is that we think this is a safety bill that will be a good one and we are supporting it for that reason," he said.

Still, the legislation contains onerous and expensive provisions the rail industry had been fighting for years.

That includes new worker fatigue protections and hours of service reform that prohibits signal and train crews from working more than 12 hours and new limits on "limbo time" - periods when train crews must wait for relief crews.

One of the most costly provisions requires the implementation of collision avoidance technology, positive train control, to be installed by 2015 on some rail lines.

The technology, which is designed to detect and automatically stop a train on a collision course, could cost the railroad industry as much as $3 billion or beyond.

But the 2015 implementation date represents a victory of sorts for the railroads. Earlier versions of the legislation had that date at 2014, and California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both Democrats, introduced legislation requiring PTC by 2012.

"The railroads … attempted, and I think quite successfully, to work things out with the rail workers and Congress," said Larry Mann, a rail attorney who represented labor unions in talks with the Association of American Railroads. 

The legislation, introduced in the House by Rep. James L. Oberstar, D-Minn., in May 2007, following high-profile accidents in Louisville, Ky., Graniteville, S.C., and other locations, had seemed all but dead for this year. 

But a Sept. 12 collision between a Union Pacific Railroad freight train and a Metrolink commuter train that killed 25 people near Los Angeles put the legislation on the fast track.

The legislation requires new training standards for railroad workers, establishes new rules for providing medical attention to injured rail workers, increases penalties for rail safety violations and "clarifies" that the mission of the Federal Railroad Administration is to "ensure that safety is the highest priority."

"Many of those provisions are not economically favorable to the railroads," said Mann.

The legislation has its critics.

"I'm not that impressed with it," said Paul F. Byrnes, a former FRA attorney and private rail consultant who spent 20 years as a locomotive engineer. "It's nice that the proposed [PTC] language of the act says 2015 … but I wouldn't bet my mortgage on it actually taking place by then."

"I know the railroads, in my opinion, do everything to delay, obfuscate and weaken the final product," he said. "I would wait and see."