Michael Paul Smith proves you don’t need a garage to work on old cars.
A very small town
Filed under Hobbies
Thursday announcement on rail funding
An announcement is expected Thursday on which proposals for new rail service may receive $8 billion in federal funding. This may include proposals for Chicago-Iowa City Chicago-Dubuque service.
The Chicago-Iowa Cty route is included in the Midwest Regional Rail Initiative’s plan, which is among the candidate projects. The MRRI’s vision calls for “high speeds” of 90 to 110 mph on the route, compared to up to 220 mph for higher-trafficed routes.
Filed under Uncategorized
Hopeful news for new rail service?
Skeptics of recent efforts to add new Amtrak service – Chicago-Dubuque, say, or Chicago-Iowa City-and-on-across-Iowa – have had one reliable stumper for rail supporters: what are these passengers going to ride in, and what’s going to pull them?
Amtrak’s car supply is barely sufficient to cover its existing routes’ normal loads, let alone handle big holidays, so any state looking to add rail service had to come up with cars and locomotives, too, largely on its own.
Until today. Amtrak President and CEO Joseph Boardman issued a statement outlining “an aggressive game plan to modernize, renew, and grow America’s passenger railroad,” including the purchase of new cars and locomotives.
Amtrak’s press release, available here, doesn’t go into specifics, but various sources told Bloomberg plans are to buy ”more than 100 locomotives and ‘several hundred’ passenger cars.”
Last year’s feasibility studies for Chicago-Quad Cities, Chicago-Iowa City, and Chicago-Dubuque (all PDF) both note “the current car supply situation at Amtrak is extremely tight and it is likely that equipment for this service would have to be generated from our storage inventory and scheduled for heavy repair in a car shop, thus requiring significant initial rehabilitation expenditures and time.”
That means rebuilding wreck-damaged cars stored at Amtrak’s systemwide shop in Beech Grove, outside Indianapolis. (A guess: rebuilding would still be quicker than designing, testing, and constructing new cars, but the most recent plan doesn’t call for the Iowa City trains to roll before 2014).
The studies call for two or three coaches and a food-service car for each of two daily Chicago-Iowa City trains. An estimate last fall put rolling stock costs at $59 million.
Another item from Boardman: the Chicago-Oakland, Calif., California Zephyr is one of five long-distance routes identified for “an in-depth evaluation of the poorest performing long-distance routes to identify and implement changes where possible to improve key measures such as customer service, ridership, and financial performance.”
The CZ runs across southern Iowa on the old Burlington Route, now BNSF, with stops at Burlington, Mount Pleasant, Ottumwa, Osceola, and Creston.
Filed under Amtrak
