Railroad infrastructure

The new president’s plans for rail infrastructure improvement have been hard to come by, but showed up on lists reportedly circulated in Congress and with the business community.

Per reports by McClatchy Newspapers, one of the largest is a high-speed rail link between Dallas and Houston, TX. Texas also gets consideration for a new commuter line cutting diagonally across the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Though on the books for some time, neither of these projects has been on a fast track, both still having to leap over major environmental and community activist hurdles.

Democrats in the Senate have stepped in to make hay on Mr. Trump’s favorability toward infrastructure spending by including California’s many infrastructure needs and projects, including its already underway high-speed rail, in their infrastructure proposal unveiled this week.

Until policy and funding is actually in place, there will be a lot of pressure from state and local governments to fund infrastructure projects already planned or underway, but that doesn’t mean that all the support should go to such projects. There just may be more efficient projects that can substitute for others that are already limited in scope or lagging in funding because they are regional and not part of a comprehensive transportation policy. In rail, two examples come to mind.

In Illinois, we see the higher-speed rail project for travel between Chicago and St. Louis getting further and further behind, largely as a consequence of unexpected delays on creating a railroad suitable to co-exist with both existing rail traffic and other surface traffic. Perhaps new infrastructure funding could encourage scrapping any further improvement on the line and, instead, go to build a fully grade separated HSR line designed to get passenger trains, and only passenger trains, over the line as quickly and safely as possible. Local freight and passenger trains could continue to reap the benefits of the improvements already in place.

Also in Illinois, the CREATE project in Chicago has lagged due to funding and the fact that freight railroads must continue to operate into the city while new track, bridges, grade separations and rights of way are built or renovated. It would make a lot more sense to fund the almost-new Great Lakes Basin project to complete a wide-circle bypass of Chicago. Once complete, this alternative for all railroads would reduce the traffic into and through the city, thereby reducing the costs of reaching CREATE’s stated goals.

Here's a big “but.” Google “Trump infrastructure plans” and you will find literally hundreds of articles written mostly for local media. All these small local venues are wondering whether Trump’s plans will include their little pet projects. Everything is there, from Colorado highways, through subways and urban “livability” projects and waterways, Louisiana lowlands, harbor projects, and airports. Oh, my! Don’t forget airports. If all the airport runway, terminal, airway and high-tech improvements were to be built, they would eat up every bit of every possible dollar that Trump could hope to scrape up and leave everything else to go begging for more.

As the weeks pass, we are sure to see more specifics and favored projects rise to the surface before a comprehensive infrastructure bill appears in a form on which Congress can vote. Let’s continue to hope that railroad infrastructure does not, once again, get the short end of the funding stick.

©2017 – 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.)