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All Passenger Rail Projects Are Not Created Equal

In a previous post, I mentioned that there are passenger rail projects around America that exist in various stages from “thought experiment” to “virtual shovel ready.” I characterized this as piecemeal expansion of our passenger system. Let’s go through some of these to see what I mean.

In the great state of California, where subsidized Amtrak is a qualified success, there have been ongoing problems with the planning of the California High Speed Rail Authority’s line between San Jose and Shafter (near Bakersfield). This is beyond the experiment stage and well into planning; and yet, funding is a bit of pie in the sky with some supposedly coming from cap and trade programs’ projected but uncertain future. While in another large state, Texas, San Antonio has seen its thought experiment for service from there to Austin dashed by Union Pacific’s refusal to bring its toys into the playroom. As I write this, nobody has identified anything but another thought experiment routing via currently unused or non-existent tracks. This has caused some local funding to be redirected, a political euphemism equivalent to “say goodbye to the money.”

Further east, on the parts of the Gulf Coast that stretches from New Orleans into Florida, the February political special touting the desired re-creation of the leg of the Sunset Limited that once made it a true transcontinental passenger train and was broken off by Hurricane Katrina, has rallied a lot of political muscle behind the project, garnered the attention of Congress and the Federal Railroad Administration, and generated a lot of local press and enthusiasm. Nobody has shown anybody the money as of yet.

Move north and east from the Gulf Coast, and you can say hello to the people of Raleigh, NC, where a failed passenger train proposal now a decade old is still so fondly remembered that nobody is going to fund anything but bus transit for the foreseeable future. Granted, this is more of a commuter issue than something that was likely to hook up with Amtrak. Along with this I would lump a project that has gotten to the test-train stage hooking up Boston with Buzzards Bay and Bourne, MA; although this one may be more in Amtrak’s province than Raleigh.

There are commuter rail expansions or startups all over the map that could become part of Amtrak, or not, depending on how the various local transportation entities approach both funding and operations. To get Amtrak’s attention, I would think that most would have to be well beyond the experimental stage.

Then there are places where there should be passenger rail projects well along the way, probably even operational, but there are none. Wisconsin pitched a valid project that had the trains already built when the Republican governor put the nix on it. There are still a lot of places where rail could be valuable but would be looked on with the skepticism of NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) because of residents’ bad experiences with bad actor freight railroads. And, let’s face it, absent construction of brand new tracks, the freight railroads are where new passenger projects will be running in a lot of communities.

This all brings me back around again to what I have been calling a National Transportation Policy. The trend for the past 20 years has been to let the states fund intercity rail of short length, the local transportation districts fund commuter rail in urban/suburban environs, and the federal taxpayer fund Amtrak long-distance and corridor operations where Amtrak owns the tracks. Piecemeal. With a National Transportation Policy and not only dedicated but also stable sources of funding for a plan where ALL of Amtrak would coordinate with ALL commuter and address ALL light rail and transit connections where everyone plays on equal footing and sucks from the same government teat, America just might achieve a passenger rail system that NIMBYs couldn’t object to. And such a powerful cooperative entity could probably at least make the freight railroads think twice before pitching a region’s well-funded plans into the trash.

© 2016 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)

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