With Obama's announcement on trains, some speculate we're going to see a return to the railroad, possibly on the scale of what Eisenhower did with freeways in the 50s.

Money: The Return of the Railroad - WSB News on wsbradio.com

WSB News
Money: The Return of the Railroad
By
Jon Lewis
@ April 29, 2009 8:22 AM Permalink | Comments (2)

(WSB Radio) They were the staple of 19th Century transportation and now, thanks to federal money, they may be the key to travel in the 21st Century.

Trains are coming back.

The Obama Administration, as part of the federal stimulus package, has devoted $8 billion for the development of high speed rail. And the southeast United States, including Georgia, should see a large sum of money going towards the development of rail.

The government has identified 10 corridors, each from 100 to 600 miles long, with greatest promise for high-speed development.

They are: a northern New England line; an Empire line running east to west in New York State; a Keystone corridor running laterally through Pennsylvania; a major Chicago hub network; a southeast network connecting the District of Columbia to Florida and the Gulf Coast; a Gulf Coast line extending from eastern Texas to western Alabama; a corridor in central and southern Florida; a Texas-to-Oklahoma line; a California corridor where voters have already approved a line that will allow travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two and a half hours; and a corridor in the Pacific Northwest.

"We've seen, basically, a monumental shift in transportation policy from this administration," says Eric Stevens, who oversees rail projects for the Georgia Department of Transportation. "You can almost kind of equate it to when Eisenhower came in and said, 'I'm going to build the interstate system.'"

The Georgia DOT is looking at three distinct rail lines, lines that would link Atlanta to major cities in and out of the state, while also making the morning drive to work a lot easier.

The main line for the southeast would link Washington, D.C. to the region. That means a high speed rail line running from the nation's capital, to Richmond, then Charlotte and beyond.

"What we propose to do, based on the pending funding, is look at Charlotte, Atlanta, Macon, Savannah, Jacksonville," Stevens says, "and complete out all the corridor through the state."

The idea is to offer residents in Atlanta another option besides flying.

"It's about choices and options," says Stevens. "Right now, you don't have an option that can get you from Atlanta to Washington in a day's time, other than a plane."

High speed rail, Stevens says, would be ideal for travel within about 450 miles of Atlanta.

"You extend into Washington. You extend to New Orleans. You extend almost into Indiana," he says. "So you can quite a few places in a 450 mile arc, which is about the optimal distance for a high speed train."

Another route under consideration would link Atlanta to Chattanooga, running over an existing line that the state already owns.

These would not be the bullet trains that run in Europe and Asia. But, Steven says, "it wouldn't exclude that. You have to have a glide path to get to that. You don't go from zero to 300 miles per hour overnight."

These trains would be the Acela trains that operated in the northeast, running at speeds approaching 150 miles per hour. That would mean a trip from Atlanta to Charlotte would take about two hours. Stevens says, if you were to fly to Charlotte, with having to get to the airport early, the security check and the flying time, the train is faster. Plus, trains are not as likely to be delayed due to weather.

In his announcement of the stimulus money, President Obama cited how rail would make driving a lot easier while also helping the environment.

"What we need, then, is a smart transportation system equal to the needs of the 21st century," he said, "a system that reduces travel times and increases mobility, a system that reduces congestion and boosts productivity, a system that reduces destructive emissions and creates jobs."

Stevens says high speed rail linking Atlanta to Washington, or Chattanooga, or New Orleans, would mean fewer cars on the road and less congestion at the airport.

Another proposal from the DOT is a freight rail line, directly linking the Port of Savannah to Atlanta.

The port is the fourth busiest in the nation, and the second busiest on the east coast. Thousands of containers enter the port each day, most bound for Atlanta by tractor trailer. A freight line would take many of those trucks off the state's highways.

"A couple of hundred thousand," Stevens says.

A possible peek into the future is available now in the city of Cordele, in south Georgia.

Cordele already has a rail line that cuts across the state to Savannah. The city is working to develop that route, which was built to bring agricultural products, like cotton, to the port.

Cordele is building a distribution facility to containerize all the cotton for shipment to the port. In addition, city officials in Cordele envision the rail working the other way, bringing goods from Savannah to their city for shipment to the southern U.S. and points west.

The new facility is expected to employ about 3500 people, with support businesses bringing in another 5000 jobs.

If a line was built directly linking Savannah to Atlanta, it would mean jobs and a lot more.

"They can put four times the amount of material on one rail car than they can on a truck," Stevens says. "They're going to save all that truck traffic coming into and through Atlanta," meaning fewer trucks during the morning commute.

There have been reports that Georgia is trailing its neighboring states in rail development and, therefore, the idea of high speed rail is doomed. Stevens says that's not the case.

He says, yes, North Carolina and Virginia are ahead of the curve, thanks to railroad consolidation two decades ago. When rail companies were bought up by larger ones, the duplicate rail lines were sold to the states. North Carolina and Virginia now own more rail lines that most other states. But, Stevens says, all that means is that Georgia is one of 46 states trailing North Carolina and Virginia. And while those two might have their systems up and running in 5 years, Georgia could be running in 9.

And while we've heard about high speed rail in Georgia in the past (Lovejoy anyone?), the stimulus money makes the difference now.

"We don't have the funding mechanisms in place to allow us to do a lot with rail and with transit," Steven says. "Our state constitution says that motor fuel money is only used for roads and bridges."

The DOT must complete environmental impact studies on the proposed rail lines, then they can begin work. Within the next decade Atlantans might find themselves traveling from home to Washington in three hours, or going to New Orleans in four, all the time watching the countryside drift by outside the window of their train.

Stevens and his counterparts in other states, say they've been waiting for this opportunity, waiting for an administration that looked to the past to see the future.

"Obama could, in essence , be the Eisenhower of the rail," Stevens says, "and bring about a national, coordinated high speed rail program, much like the interstate under Eisenhower."