Comment on Passenger Train Grants Announced Today

For Immediate Release (#10-02)

January 28, 2010

Contacts: Ross Capon, Sean Jeans-Gail: 202-408-8362

As a follow-up to our statement yesterday enthusiastically supporting President Obama’s high speed rail initiative, we offer these preliminary comments on the specific grants that have been announced, followed by some quotations from the Tampa town meeting at which the President and Vice-President spoke earlier this afternoon. For more details on the grants, see the White House summary and more details about each region’s grants.

California

California High-Speed Rail: $2.25 billion. California has the most advanced process for creating super-high speed rail in the U.S.; this project is awarded $2.25 billion. We have long predicted, and we strongly approve of, California winning the largest share of the $8 billion.

California Conventional Corridors, $94 million. The Surfliner and Capitol corridors, already showcases for conventional intercity trains’ potential to woo travelers from crowded highways, will become even more attractive as new and better track infrastructure reduces trip times and allows for more frequency and reliability.

Pacific Northwest

Cascade Corridor track improvements: $598 million. The attractive Talgo train service here, supported by strong state DOT efforts, is another major success story and thus another solid foundation on which to make further progress—more frequent service with better on-time performance will result from alleviating train congestion between Seattle and Eugene, along with a facelift for Portland’s Union Station.

Midwest

110-mph Chicago-St. Louis trains: $1.1 billion. It is appropriate that Chicago-St. Louis takes the biggest prize in terms of upgrading conventional services. A four-hour Chicago-St. Louis running time—together with the Gateway Multimodal Transportation Center that opened in St. Louis in 2008—will set the stage for more frequent, faster and reliable service that will prove a very attractive, all-weather alternative to driving or flying.

Bridge and crossover expansion St. Louis to Kansas City: $31 million. The Missouri River Runner—two daily round-trips that have exceeded ridership expectations and achieved dramatic on-time performance gains are poised to build on that success.

Wisconsin service enhancements: $822 million. Long-planned direct service between Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city, and Madison, its capital, will get a jumpstart through station refurbishments and positive train control implementation.  The successful Chicago-Milwaukee Hiawatha Service gets a reliability boost and better stations.

Ohio’s 3-C Corridor: $400 million. The Cleveland-Columbus-Dayton-Cincinnati corridor long has been recognized as one of the most glaring gaps in the nation’s passenger train network. The hard work of Gov. Ted Strickland and Ohio DOT Director Jolene Molitoris (former Federal Railroad Administrator) and many Ohioans is justly rewarded.

Detroit-Chicago modernizations: $244 million. The Amtrak-owned third of this route already includes the highest passenger train speeds outside the Northeast. This route long has been recognized for its strong potential. Part of this money will help implement a phase of the crucial CREATE project to smooth the flow of rail traffic through Chicago.

Four new crossovers on BNSF’s Ottumwa Subdivision in Iowa: $17 million. These will ease the flow of rail traffic on this piece of the transcontinental line used by Amtrak’s California Zephyr and should improve the train’s reliability. The few existing crossovers are all hand-thrown.

Southeast

Florida High-Speed Rail: $1.25 billion. Next to California, Florida has arguably done the most work on super-high speed rail and appropriately is the other state to get a grant for such a project. The first phase involves building a new, Tampa-Orlando line largely in the median of Interstate 4. Ultimately, we look for connections between the planned, 150 mph service and other passenger train services, both commuter rail and intercity.

90 mph on North Carolina’s Piedmont corridor: $520 million. What are soon to be three daily Raleigh-Charlotte round-trips will double to six, operating at top speeds of 90 mph thanks to track upgrades and new equipment purchases funded by ARRA. North Carolina has been ahead of the game on passenger rail for nearly 30 years, and its state –level investments will finally get a deserved matching federal commitment.

Rail congestion mitigation from Washington, DC, to Raleigh: $100 million. Sidings will be added at three points between Selma, NC and the NC/VA line, as well as a third track on a stretch north of Richmond, reducing bottlenecks that hamper on-time performance on key pieces of the main line used by all Amtrak trains linking Virginia with Charleston, Savannah and Florida.

A faster, more reliable Heartland Flyer: $4 million. Grade crossing signal timing improvements between Fort Worth and and the TX/OK line will let the Fort Worth-Oklahoma City train run faster on this stretch.  The Texas/Oklahoma/Arkansas region is a key illustration of the need for still greater investment than Congress has provided to date.

Northeast

Better rides in New York State: $151 million. New tracks, signals, and grade crossing safety enhancements will produce a higher-quality Empire Service, while Rochester and Buffalo-Depew stations will get needed facelifts. Three miles of new track will improve running times on the New York-Montreal Adirondack.

Northeast Corridor enhancements: $112 million. Engineering and environmental work for a new tunnel in Baltimore and a new BWI Airport rail station, the latter enhancing intermodal connectivity. Other track work along the line will make travel within the nation’s most densely-populated region even more reliable and safe. In addition to Maryland, work will also be done in Rhode Island, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia. While the nation’s most heavily traveled rail corridor gets only a modest share of the $8 billion, the Northeast has benefitted heavily from Amtrak’s capital program, from the Northeast Corridor Improvement Project, and most recently from its share of the $1.3 billion that Amtrak received in the Recovery Act.

Downeaster extension to Brunswick, Maine: $35 million. This will produce a near-term service expansion, extending this popular service further east.

Keystone Corridor grade crossing elimination: $27 million. This removes the three remaining highway grade crossings from the 110-mph, electrified Philadelphia-Harrisburg line, improving safety and security. There is also planning money for extending frequent service to Pittsburgh.

More direct Vermonter route and track enhancements: $120 million. Restoring the direct Springfield, MA-Brattleboro, VT route through Northampton will improve running times for this Vermont-funded train, as will further upgrades to the New England Central Railroad in Vermont, resulting in an eventual savings of 90 minutes off of the current New Haven-St. Albans travel time.

New Haven-Springfield double-tracking: $40 million. Adding a new segment of second main track will improve reliability and speed for Hartford and Springfield travelers on Regionals and the Vermonter, while facilitating establishment of commuter service on the line.

Planning studies

At least $6 million was granted for states to do planning for future service in 11 states. These include extending electrification from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, PA, and fully double-tracking the line from Chicago to St. Louis. Some planning money was given to states that currently lack rail programs within their Departments of Transportation: Alabama, Georgia, Kansas and West Virginia. NARP will work with out partners in these states to make sure that these studies lead to the development of rail expertise in these states’ DOTs, and to secure the funding to begin to implement the planned projects.

Excerpts from today’s town hall meeting at the University of Tampa

President Obama: How many of you have been on high-speed trains outside the country? Those things are fast, they are smooth, you don’t have to take off your shoes. Why don’t we have them? Part of it is that our population centers are farther apart. But let’s face it, we just love our cars. We don’t love gas prices, but we love our cars. But we need to invest in infrastructure like HSR that will allow us to choose the option of taking the train. If more facilities like that are available, it’ll be good for the economy of the region, and for productivity because people will get to work on time faster and less frazzled.

Vice-President Biden: Real simple. In the 50s, building the Interstate highways, we picked the portions that would have the heaviest traffic, and built them out. The DOT picked Tampa-Orlando because you were the most ready, your plan was the most advanced. We also picked California because they are planned and ready to go. They all have GOP governors, so this wasn’t about politics. The good news is that we’re funding planning efforts as well, and we’re making a big difference by getting railroads like Richmond-Washington to 100 mph. We can increase the speed enough to make a difference in congestion. I-95 cost $22 mil per lane-mile. You can build the railroad for less than $2 mil per route-mile.