Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila
Right... the portion of the St. Louis line north of Dwight receives no improvements. It's a shame, too... crawling through the Southwest Side is much more aggravating than crawling through cornfields. The double-tracking program is massively expensive... estimated at $3.4 billion IIRC. That's a huge chunk of change that could probably be better spent untangling rail congestion in the Chicago area.
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The Keystone Corridor I'm less concerned about... they're already running 90mph 110mph service, and investments there tie the major metropolis of Harrisburg into the NEC. It does lay the groundwork for Pittsburgh-Philly HSR, but the difficult part of that route is the mountainous stretch further west, which is also conveniently one of the busiest freight lines in the country. Is Pennsylvania even studying what this route needs for real 110mph service from end to end?
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The $3.1 billion figure for the Chicago-St. Louis corridor was the omnibus project for the whole thing - double tracking the entire length, signal work, new rolling stock, station improvements, improvements into Chicago. The $1.14 billion Illinois got is a subset of the $3.1 billion proposal. So several billion more would complete the Chi-St Louis corridor upgrade on top of what has been granted.
As for the Keystone corridor, the Keystone service NYC to Philly to Harrisburg is Amtrak 5th busiest corridor service (after Northeast Regionals, Acela, Pacific Surfliner, Capitol Corridor in that order) and has shown steady growth in the years since PA put up $160 million to restore the tracks and electrified service. Harrisburg had 547 thousand and Lancaster PA had 515 thousand passengers using their stations in FY10. Because of the Penn Railroad legacy, this is a well established corridor and route. Amtrak owns the Philly to Harrisburg tracks, so this is a low hanging fruit for service improvements with no freight railroad issues to deal with.
There have been numerous PA studies at improving service to Pittsburgh. There was a recent study on adding a second daily train by extending a Keystone to Pitt. The real problem is that the Pittsburgh to Harrisburg 249 mile route was laid down around 150 years ago and is hardly the most direct route. Trip times are much longer than driving on the PA Turnpike. The question is whether it is worthwhile to spend a lot of money on improvements to the current tracks including possibly electrifying the entire segment which would run serious bucks with likely only modest improvements in trip time.
Or if we are to get serious about HSR in the US, look at building a new ROW to Pittsburgh through the mountains with modern tunneling technology. Connect Pittsburgh to Harrisburg to Philly and the NEC with a true HSR route. This would be one of the more challenging HSR corridors in the US to build. But, once HSR to Pittsburgh is in place, extend the HSR corridor to Cleveland to connect to the mid-West HSR system (this of course would be long after Gov. Kasich in Ohio has left office) for a east coast to Chicago HSR route.
Meanwhile, PA recently signed off on a $750K planning grant from the HSIPR stimulus to match $750K of PA state money for a study of the options for the Keystone West corridor. Improvements to the Keystone East corridor with upgrades to 125 mph speeds will help build support over time for extending higher speed and frequency service to Pittsburgh.
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