On January 23, 1998, FRA, in cooperation with the Association of American Railroads (AAR) and the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) initiated development of a positive train control (PTC) project for the high-speed rail corridor between St. Louis-Chicago.  Railroad industry efforts geared toward PTC development have since been integrated into the North American Joint PTC (NAJPTC) Program. This project is an important venue for the industry's establishment of uniform standards for PTC interoperability (i.e., the ability of a train to move from one railroad or from one type of train control system onto another at track speed while under continuous supervision of the train control systems).  Project costs were being shared by the AAR , IDOT, and the FRA under its Next Generation High Speed Rail (NGHSR) Program.

The Transportation Technology Center Inc (TTCI), a subsidiary of AAR , was under contract to develop the specifications and a Request for Proposal (RFP) with Aeronautical Radio Inc. (ARINC) as the s ystem e ngineer, and to manage this project under the NAJPTC Program.  A contract was also awarded to Lockheed Martin Corporation in June 2000 to be the System Developer/Integrator for the PTC system on the St. Louis-Chicago corridor.

As of August 2006, several field trials have been conducted on the St. Louis-Chicago corridor for testing and debugging.  Despite some success in the verification tests of the system in these field trials, a significant amount of development effort is still required before a revenue-service ready PTC system is complete.  In September 2006, the stakeholders agreed to move this research and development effort to the Transportation Technology Center in Pueblo , Colorado , which provides an ideal controlled environment for system refinement and testing.  Lockheed Martin Corporation has agreed to provide in-kind development/engineering services for about 3 years.  Contingent upon funding availability, FRA will continue to provide program management support and system engineering services.  This new program started in January 2007.