Officials of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and Norfolk Southern Railway, along with passenger rail aficionados, can hardly contain themselves over news that the state and the railroad have finalized an agreement that will allow Amtrak to add an additional round-trip train between Pittsburgh and New York City.
But the deal is fraught with serious issues — from who gets the bill, to who’s paying for what, to what’s not being fixed and to who really benefits.
As the Tribune-Review’s Ryan Deto reports:
“PennDOT officials said the state will invest more than $200 million for infrastructure and safety improvements that will help to accommodate the additional trains.
“Amtrak now operates one daily round trip between Pittsburgh and New York City, via Harrisburg and Philadelphia. The agreement supports increasing that to two daily round trips. It would mark the first additional passenger train service for Western Pennsylvania in decades.”
Federal tax dollars will be used to switch to Amtrak’s new Airo trains on the route.
But as Deto has frequently reminded — and reminds again:
“In addition to another round trip for passenger service, the upgrades should improve the reliability of trains, but likely won’t improve speeds. “The Pennsylvanian takes more than five hours to go between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, and more than nine hours between Pittsburgh and New York City.”
Which, of course, is ridiculous.
PennDOT Deputy Secretary Jennie Louwerse has said that Western Pennsylvania’s mountainous terrain makes improving speeds extremely difficult and overly costly.
So, taxpayers will be on the hook to preserve such nonsense? Sounds to us like taxpayers are more likely funding improvements that will more benefit Norfolk Southern’s freight operations, does it not?
And there’s another major issue here, as reported by the Post-Gazette:
“[PennDOT] didn’t say whether the agreement would give right-of-way priority to passenger or freight trains.”
Which long has been a major bugaboo. Freight now has priority. If that remains the case, this deal is looking more and more like a nice, fat handout to Norfolk Southern.
Still, there’s lots of PennDOT happy talk about how this deal “will reduce commute times, help connect hundreds of thousands of residents and boost local economies.”
But we are quite skeptical. And so, too, should be the taxpayers footing the bill.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
