FREE REIN TO 110 IS CHEAPER THAN DOING STUDIES.  Trains columnist Fred W. Frailey takes stock of Passenger Rail projects, many of which are being undone in the procedural wrangling among the passenger train operators, the freight railroads, and the Federal Railroad Administration.  The money for infrastructure improvements isn't getting much in the way of infrastructure improvements.

Imagine a rail line now handling 20 trains a day that capacity modeling on computers shows could handle another ten freight trains. The railroad wants enough new capacity built into the line through HSR grants to handle new higher speed passenger trains and those ten future freights. FRA’s stance, in turn, is to protect the public purse against giving railroads anything they haven’t paid for. The actual points of contention are over the details, but future capacity remains the 800-pound gorilla.


So impasse results, and a year after the Department of Transportation announced the first of the HSR grants, there’s very little to show for it. New governors in Ohio and Wisconsin returned almost $1.4 in grants, which were redistributed to other states. The governors of Iowa and Florida may do likewise, rejecting another $2.4 billion-plus, and Michigan is concerned it can’t afford the required matching funds. California’s high-speed network has gotten grants totaling about $3 billion, but that’s a pittance for an endeavor to connect San Francisco and Southern California that now carries a $43 billion price tag — this in a state whose public finances now resemble those of a third-world country.

On the other hand, more modest projects, on actually existing corridors, make progress.

The biggest project actually underway is in Illinois, where Union Pacific is upgrading track to permit three 110-mph round trips between Chicago and St. Louis, reducing travel time by as many as 48 minutes from the current schedules of roughly 5 hours 30 minutes. Federal grants will finance almost all of this $1.1 billion undertaking. A second phase, which would involve double-tracking the entire route to permit eight 110-mph round trips, would cost an additional $3 billion. That phase is under review and remains unfunded. UP, by the way, plans to significantly increase the number of freights it operates between Chicago and St. Louis, and says the two-step construction plan provides capacity for both passenger and freight trains.

That double-tracking will restore the track capacity of the old Chicago and Alton (without the color-position lights) and give Union Pacific a more direct line from St. Louis to Chicago than either the former Chicago and Eastern Illinois line it acquired from Missouri Pacific or the former Litchfield and Madison line, with some nasty grades in the Illinois Valley, it acquired from Chicago and North Western.  The proposed train frequency exceeds that offered by the Alton and Gulf Mobile and Ohio: both passengers and the freight train operator benefit.  If the work is done, there will be faster passenger train service, and more freight train capacity.  In many corridors, the only work involves meetings and reports, in other words, non-work.

In all, DOT made 107 HSR grants last year. But looks are deceiving, because the great majority are what I call welfare payments to the consulting business. They pay for state rail plans, feasibility and environmental studies, design of projects not yet funded, and a host of other paper projects.

There is good news outside the Land of Lincoln.

So far as I know, the only HSR construction actually underway outside of Illinois is in New England. There, Pan Am Railway is upgrading tracks between Portland and Brunswick, Me., to permit a 30-mile extension of the five Downeaster round trips to and from Boston, at a cost of $38 million. And in Vermont, $50 million is being spent to upgrade a 190-mile segment of RailAmerica subsidiary New England Central Railroad. Amtrak’s Vermonter will benefit by having top speed raised from 50 mph to as much as 79 mph, speeding its trip by at least an hour. Everywhere else, it’s still big hat, no cattle.

The Downeaster is an excellent example of incremental improvements of ordinary passenger trains, beginning from a very unfavorable position.  Guilford Transportation, or whatever the heirs to Patrick McGinnis call themselves, was more hostile to passenger trains than Union Pacific, and New Hampshire more than willing to host station stops at Durham, Exeter, and Dover, as long as Maine and Massachusetts paid for the trains.  And yet the trains run, and, with a little luck, you'll see swag from L. L. Bean being schlepped home by train in a few years.