Advocates call for 220 mph Midwest train service Posted by: News  on Thursday, July 02, 2009 - 09:00 AM CHICAGO - When it comes to trains, there's fast and then there's really, really fast. Advocates on Tuesday unveiled an $11.5 billion plan for a Chicago-St. Louis high-speed line that could cut travel times to two hours from the current five. If built, it would be among the fastest U.S. lines and would rival high-tech systems already in place in Europe and Asia. Read the Full Story Here.

Tri-Rail board adjusts budget to keep trains running Posted by: News  on Wednesday, July 01, 2009 - 08:00 AM SOUTH FLORIDA - Tri-Rail’s governing board dug deep and found the money to keep service running at current levels. The South Florida Regional Transportation Authority (SFRTA) on Friday voted to take money from Tri-Rail’s capital funds and shift them to operations, said Joe Giulietti, SFRTA’s executive director. Read the Full Story Here.

Texas lagging in race for high-speed rail money from U.S. government Posted by: News  on Tuesday, June 30, 2009 - 08:00 AM AUSTIN – Texas for years has taken a highway-centric approach to transportation, a factor that is likely to put it at a disadvantage this summer as it competes for billions of dollars in new federal money for high-speed passenger rail. The federal government has offered $8 billion now, and an additional $5 billion over five years, to develop 11 high-speed passenger rail corridors throughout the United States. Two of those corridors run through Texas, including one that would link Dallas to Austin and San Antonio. Read the Full Story Here.

City leaders push for DART rail line by planned convention hotel Posted by: News  on Monday, June 29, 2009 - 08:00 AM DALLAS - Running the new downtown Dallas rail line by the proposed convention center hotel will cost the most of any of the four options under review by DART and would at least initially attract fewer pedestrians to its rail stations. Still, city leaders, including Mayor Tom Leppert, strongly support aligning the long-awaited second downtown Dallas light rail line south to the new hotel site and then to an underground station at City Hall. That option was added last year, at the city's behest, to a list of potential routes under review by DART. Read the Full Story Here.

With road ending for highway law, Congress tackles new blueprint Posted by: News  on Saturday, June 27, 2009 - 08:00 AM WASHINGTON - Congress will start down one of its longest, most winding and most-lobbied roads on Wednesday as it begins to rewrite how highway and transit programs will be planned, built and funded for the next six years. Lawmakers face two tough deadlines: Current law governing highway and transit programs expires Sept. 30, and the Transportation Department has estimated that the Highway Trust Fund, which helps pay for the projects, will run out of money in mid-to-late August. Read the Full Story Here.

9 dead, many hurt in D.C. rail crash Posted by: News  on Friday, June 26, 2009 - 08:00 AM WASHINGTON | A rush-hour collision between two crowded trains Monday on Washington's subway system killed at least nine people and injured dozens, trapping commuters in a stack of twisted rail cars that rescuers were still searching hours later. Witnesses say a train near the Fort Totten station on the Metro's Red Line was rear-ended by another train, which climbed atop the stopped cars ahead of it and left a two-level snarl of debris. Read the Full Story Here.

Budget change proposed to save weekend Tri-Rail service Posted by: News  on Thursday, June 25, 2009 - 08:00 AM WEST PALM BEACH | Could a last-minute budget move salvage Tri-Rail weekend service? Again, this year, the state legislature failed to approve a permanent funding source for the South Florida's commuter rail line. Also contributions from the three counties where Tri-Rail runs, are expected to be way down due to the bad economy dragging down revenues. Read the Full Story Here.

Federal aid revives plans for Georgia high-speed rail Posted by: News  on Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - 08:00 AM ATLANTA | Georgians may soon have a choice of trains - super-fast ones in some cases - to ride between cities on the East Coast just as they do airline flights now. Though the revival of passenger rail service has been talked of and dreamed of for decades, the federal government is now offering huge sums that could provide the locomotion states need to finally pull the train out of the station. Yet, some critics say other factors aren't yet in place. Read the Full Story Here.

U.S. Stimulus Puts Bullet Trains On the Fast Track Posted by: News  on Tuesday, June 23, 2009 - 08:00 AM FLORIDA | Florida, like many of America's biggest states, can be frustrating to traverse. Driving between such major cities as Miami and Tampa is a back-numbing haul; flying between them, especially at the exorbitant fares many airlines charge, often seems impractical. And as the peninsula state's population has exploded in recent years — Florida is set to pass New York as the nation's third largest state — its road and air corridors have become more gridlocked and eco-unfriendly. Which is why Floridians voted in 2000 to build a high-speed bullet-train service between Miami, Tampa and Orlando. By 2004, however, then-governor Jeb Bush, who had insisted the estimated $6 billion cost would in reality top $20 billion, had persuaded Florida voters to drop the idea. But the bullet-train idea is back, as it is throughout the rest of the country, thanks to $13 billion for high-speed rail (HSR) that was tucked into President Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package. The application process for bullet-train bucks ($8 billion this year and $1 billion in each of the next five years) began this week. States like Florida are vying for big chunks of it — not only as free funding for a traffic decongestant they thought they couldn't afford, but also as a high-tech pump primer for the kind of higher-wage jobs that low-wage economies like Florida's need. Current Florida governor Charlie Crist, who has angered conservatives in his Republican Party by embracing Obama's overall stimulus program — and who has reversed much of Jeb Bush's antigovernment agenda — said recently that rail projects like HSR are "critical because we're still a growth state. Any of these transportation alternatives are good for Florida and good for jobs." Read the Full Story Here.

Getting Up to Speed Posted by: News  on Monday, June 22, 2009 - 08:00 AM NEW YORK | This is a story not about Amtrak but about trains, and the problem with any story about trains in America is that you often find yourself thinking about Amtrak, and you often find yourself thinking about how nice it would be if you weren’t thinking about Amtrak. This is especially true when you’re actually riding on Amtrak, which happened to be the case one morning in March when I boarded the Pacific Surfliner in downtown Los Angeles for a 500-mile trip, mostly up the coast, to Sacramento. Anyone who lives in California can tell you that this is folly: other ways of traveling from Los Angeles to Sacramento are quicker and less frustrating and not much more expensive. You can fly in 90 minutes for around $100. Or you can drive in six hours for less than $50 in gas. For $55, my Amtrak journey was scheduled to take at least 12 hours 25 minutes. With any luck, I would arrive there by 9 p.m. And it was fairly obvious to me that I would need some luck, because my ticket to Sacramento had not bought me a train ride, exactly, but a train-bus-train ride. In San Luis Obispo, I would get off the Surfliner and board an Amtrak bus; in San Jose, I would get off the bus and board a different train to Sacramento. There was little room for error: a slow train and I would miss the bus; a slow bus and I would miss the second train. It’s true I could have taken other trains to Sacramento instead, but these had their own drawbacks. The Coast Starlight, for instance, which runs north along the Pacific Coast from L.A., doesn’t involve any buses, but travel time is an estimated 13 hours 44 minutes. What’s worse, the Starlight, a k a the Starlate, is a train of such legendary unreliability that it is not so much a train as an anti-train. In the past it has been known to run 11 or 12 hours behind schedule and post an on-time percentage in the single digits. A third travel option promised to take about eight hours over a more direct inland route. To leave at a reasonable hour, though, I would need to take a bus from L.A. to Bakersfield, catch a train called the San Joaquin and travel to Stockton, then ride another bus from Stockton to Sacramento. So I opted for the train-bus-train combo over the bus-train-bus alternative. Read the Full Story Here.

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