Making the Trains Run
Time for real improvement to rail service
Bryan Zepp Jamieson
December 10th, 2023
President Biden announced the other day that an additional $8.2 billion would be allocated toward improving Amtrak routes and service. This is a huge deal for the passenger rail service, which has survived decades of Republican efforts to destroy it by nickel-and-diming it to death.
The new funding will go to the following projects (per the DoT website):
Projects announced through the Federal State Partnership for Intercity Passenger Rail (Fed-State National) Program will advance two high-speed rail corridors and fund improvements to existing rail corridors for expanded service and performance. These investments will:
- Help deliver high-speed rail service in California’s Central Valley
- Create a brand-new high-speed rail corridor between Las Vegas, Nevada, and southern California, serving an estimated 11 million passengers annually
- Make major upgrades to existing conventional rail corridors to better connect Northern Virginia and the Southeast with the Northeast Corridor
- Expand and add frequencies to the Pennsylvania Keystone Corridor between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh
- Extend the Piedmont Corridor in North Carolina north, as part of a higher-speed connection between Raleigh and Richmond, Virginia
- Invest in Chicago Union Station, as an initial step toward future improvements to the critical Midwest corridors hub
- Improve service in Maine, Montana, and Alaska
The DoT webpage adds, “At the same time, FRA is announcing 69 corridor selections across 44 states through the Corridor Identification and Development (Corridor ID) Program, which will drive future passenger rail expansion.
“Corridor ID, a new planning program made possible by President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, will help guide intercity passenger rail development throughout the country. This inaugural round of selections aims to upgrade 15 existing rail routes, add or extend service on 47 new routes, and advance 7 new high-speed rail projects, creating a pipeline of intercity passenger rail projects ready for implementation and future investment. FRA will work closely with states, transportation agencies, host and operating railroads, and local governments to develop and build passenger rail projects faster than ever before.”
Yes, that’s a big deal. It’s the biggest single investment in Amtrak in its history. America has the crappiest rail service in the developed world, and lags behind some third world nations (mostly because China invested heavily in foreign rail in order to open up trade routes). The freight lines are in dire shape because private companies are more interested in spending money on lobbyists to defeat rail regulation and ads boasting of their safety then they are on spending money on safety, 21st century technology, or even routine maintenance.
The Biden administration announced future plans to present to a Congress that hopefully by 2025 will be run by people who can work for the nation, rather than the futile, vulgar, strutting clowns that run the show now. Those plans include:
- New high-speed rail service in the Cascadia High-Speed Rail Corridor between Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia
- New high-speed rail service between Dallas and Houston
- New and upgraded Midwest Chicago hub corridors:
- Daily, multi-frequency service from Chicago to Indianapolis
- Increased frequencies from Chicago to Milwaukee to the Twin Cities, with an extension to Madison, Wisconsin
- Improved service and increased frequencies from Chicago to Detroit, with an extension to Windsor, providing a direct connection to Canada’s high-speed rail network
- A comprehensive plan for the Chicago terminal and service chokepoints south of Lake Michigan benefiting all corridors and long-distance trains south and east of Chicago
- New service between the Twin Cities and Duluth, Minnesota
- New service from Fort Collins to Pueblo, Colorado, with intermediate stops at Boulder, Denver, and Colorado Springs
- New service between Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, with multiple daily frequencies
- New service connecting Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana
- New connections between the Northeast Corridor and Northern Delaware and Reading and Scranton, Pennsylvania
- Expanded connections and increased frequencies within California’s extensive conventional rail network
- Expanded connections and service in Florida’s intercity rail network between the key travel markets of Tampa, Jacksonville, Orlando, and Miami
- New service between Atlanta and Savanah, and from Atlanta to Nashville and Memphis via Chattanooga
- Restoration of service between Chicago and Seattle, Washington, through multiple rural communities in North Dakota and Montana that are currently not served by passenger rail
It’s all part of the vast infrastructure bill that was passed a couple of years ago, some $1.3 trillion dollars. Over all, that plan, the biggest in American history (yes, even bigger than Eisenhower’s Interstate bill) will revolutionize transit and trade within the United States. It includes:
- $110 billion for roads, bridges and other major projects;
- $11 billion for transportation safety programs;
- $39 billion to modernize transit and improve accessibility;
- $66 billion for passenger and freight rail;
- $7.5 billion to build a national network of electric vehicle chargers;
- $73 billion to overhaul the nation’s power infrastructure, clean energy transmission, and overall energy policy;
- $65 billion for broadband development
Of course, Biden boasted about this the other day, and made one of his characteristic verbal slip-ups. He said, “Over a billion three hundred million trillion three hundred million dollars!” when he was trying to say “Over one trillion three hundred billion dollars!” Of course, the Murdoch-owned Post was all over that shit, claiming it showed that Biden was losing it. But that senile guy got the biggest “infrastructure week” ever, after repeated boasts of Infrastructure Weeks from his predecessor, whose proclamations became empty jokes. Biden made it happen, rather than vacuous vaporbills. Of course, Murdoch lost three-quarters of a billion dollars (what Biden might call $750 trillion billion million bananas) because unlike Biden, he didn’t know who the fucking President of the United States was. Or at least, had his Lord Haw-Haws claim Trump had won. So there’s that.
Biden just keeps winning. And now, our infrastructure is climbing out of the 19th century.
