The Hoboken Terminal Incident

I was saddened and sickened by the train crash at the New Jersey Transit in Hoboken, N.J., this past Thursday.  The engineer was apparently unable to slow down the train in time and caused the crash that took out a good deal of the pillars and roof of the terminal platform and went through a passenger concourse.  A couple of the rail cars were severely damaged as well.  One woman on the platform was killed an 114 passengers were injured; the engineer, slightly injured himself, is cooperating with investigators.

Like the Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia in May 2015, this tragedy could have been stop with positive train control technology.  Why wasn't it available?  Why is is so difficult for this country to provide safe, efficient, quality passenger rail service?  And why do politicians keep giving it short shrift when it clearly is a benefit for our country and our economy?    

This is never going to end, as long as passenger trains are treated by the government like unwanted stepchildren.  I found it to be an all too appropriate coincidence when I realized that this accident occurred almost fifty years to the day after passenger rail service to where I live was ended, never to be reinstated.  I'll talk more about that in a different post. :-(  

Corridor Concerns

With the governors of Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida - three governors who, incidentally, could all be fighting for their political lives will before they're up for re-election in 2014 - having canceled high-speed rail projects in their states, Congress is likely to do the same for the nation at large. President Obama's attempt to make high-speed passenger rail accessible to 80 percent of all Americans by 2035 could be a casualty of the budget-cutting attempts on Capitol Hill. But - and this is an important "but" - that doesn't mean high-speed rail in America is about to be abandoned completely. And I'm not talking about Illinois's "high-speed" Chicago-St. Louis corridor, which will feature six train sets that travel at 110 miles an hour (you call that fast?) or California's bullet train project, with a projected cost off $100 billion that could be hard to sustain economically and politically.

I'm actually talking about the Northeast Corridor. (Yes, we in the Northeast have the Acela, but at 150 mph it hardly compares to the even faster trains enjoyed in France and Germany.) As a Florida Republican, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman John Mica hardly sounds like an ally of high-speed rail, given the fact that both his governor and his party have said no to it. But Mica not only supports high-speed rail, he thinks that the only way to ensure its success nationwide - even in increasingly crowded California - is to first build it where it's going to get the most use and be most appreciated. For Mica, that means the line between Boston and Washington by way of New York.

"While I want to give California every chance and opportunity to be successful," Mica told a conference of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association in New York on November 8, "I think we have to redirect our efforts to having at least one success in high-speed rail in the nation. And that high-speed rail success needs to be here in the Northeast Corridor."

Mica also reversed himself on privatizing Amtrak. Some Republicans have suggested that privatizing the national passenger railroad and making it susceptible to market forces would encourage high-speed rail to be developed faster. However, Mica, who once agreed with the idea, now rejects the idea, believing that Amtrak is now willing to work with Congress to make something happen.

Meanwhile, Congress is also ready to allocate $15 million as a down payment for engineering work on the proposed Gateway tunnel to connect Secaucus, New Jersey with Penn Station (someday to be named Moynihan Station, after the late U.S. Senator from New York) in Midtown Manhattan. The project looks to be less expensive than the proposed Access to the Region's Core tunnel that New Jersey governor Chris Christie canceled for being too costly, and it will allow thirteen extra New Jersey Transit trains and eight extra Amtrak trains into New York when it is completed in 2020 or 2021. Christie is more receptive to this plan.

As a passenger rail advocate, you take your victories where you can find them . . ..

All Aboard The Train

We passenger rail advocates had a very good day yesterday. I don't know if we'll have many good days ahead, but yesterday was a very good day because of the announcement of two major rail projects involving the Northeast.

First, an alternative idea has been announced in the effort to build a new rail tunnel between New York City and New Jersey. Amtrak is planning to build a $13.5 billion tunnel that will connect New Jersey to Penn Station in Manhattan and will mostly follow the route of the tunnel canceled by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, but it will involve more of a federal role and will spare New Jersey taxpayers any cost overruns. And, it will connect Amtrak and NJ Transit's trains with other lines rather than end a block or two away under Macy's. This is actually not a new idea, as it is a revised version of a 1999 proposal to build two tunnels from New Jersey, one connecting with Grand Central Terminal and the other connecting to Penn Station. The Grand Central proposal was abandoned in 2003 due to infighting between NJ Transit and its commuter rail counterparts serving New York and Connecticut over sharing Grand Central access.

The tunnel that will now be built was originally scuttled in favor of the Access to the Region's Core (ARC) tunnel killed by Governor Christie. As Paul Mulshine reported in the Newark Star-Ledger, the ARC plan "pleased no one except the NJ Transit executives and the contractors who would have gotten the work." Connectivity was a major complaint among the ARC tunnel's critics, because it led to a separate station near Macy's and was derided as the "tunnel to Macy's basement." Christie probably looks like a hero now, having canceled the ARC tunnel and forced the pursuit of a more cost-effective alternative. He's in favor of the Amtrak plan.

Speaking of Amtrak, here's the other big story. Vice President Joe Biden went to Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia to announce that the Obama administration will press for a re-authorization of the federal Surface Transportation Program with an expanded mission that includes high-speed intercity rail, committing the government to a $53 billion, six-year plan to get such a system started. It looks like this country is finally prepared to commit itself to modernizing passenger rail before the end of this decade, not unlike the commitment to the moon landing project of the 1960s. But Republicans in Congress are still wary of more government spending, and some anti-rail politicians are convinced that our primary transportation focus must be on highways. Commitment from the executive branch to a national goal doesn't guarantee success. If you disagree, I have a national health insurance card from the Clinton years I'd like to show you.

I want to believe this is for real this time. Biden seems to. But online readers of newspapers like the Camden (N.J.) Courier-Post, which was the primary source for this blog entry, not only don't believe it, they don't want it. The arguments are the same - it will bankrupt the country, it will lead to higher taxes, it's an expensive toy - and they don't take into account the massive government subsidies given to aviation and highways. I hope this project gets under way soon. Because the Northeast Corridor Acela train, while sleek and comfortable, averages 60 to 80 mph between Boston and Washington despite its 150-mph top speed . . . and trains in other countries go faster than that.

It was a new day yesterday for American passenger rail advocates, but it may be an old day soon if not much happens.