Quote:
Originally Posted by montydawg
Well, the economics of running a passenger railroad are not favorable to freight- so I believe CSX and NS are out. Nearly all countries, including China, are subsidizing the passenger railroad networks. Bright line plans on making a good chunk of their money on real estate. They purchased large chunks of land before stations were announced and plans leases on those plots and other like deals. Being bright line is more or less run by the existing railroad down the coast, FEC, who already owns the land, the economics were favorable since they already own the track. Florida also has a lot of density along a straight line, which is not really the case in atlanta outside peach tree street. I think any railroad in Georgia will need to be subsidized by the government, as any railroad with a slight chance of being profitable is being persued by private companies now.
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Agreed with everything.
Additionally: Florida being a "spoke" on the rail network (based on its geography) means the opportunity costs of using existing freight rail corridors for passenger is much lower there than it is here in Atlanta. We're a hub for rail, just like in air travel, and adding passenger trains into the mix means you can handle a lot less freight than if the line is 100% dedicated to freight.
Most of our rail corridors are heavily-used, and even the lower-use generally connect with a heavily-used one before they get very close into the city. For instance, the big challenge on the Lovejoy commuter train (the one that NS was on board with) was getting into the actual city center and getting people off the train, after it joins CSX in East Point.
CSX going out to the east of Atlanta towards Stone Mountain seems like a decent opportunity for some rail, since there aren't any major junctions all the way to downtown and it's a pretty lightly traveled line. But, in my unsolicited opinion, we should just spend whatever number of hundreds of millions it costs to extend MARTA a mile or two and put in another station, and grow the network that way. If we had been adding an incremental station to the end of one MARTA line or another every other year, we'd have a significantly bigger network after a decade or two, and it would be much easier to sell to neighboring counties that they should buy into the system as well.
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