Yes, after NS extorted $200 million out of the Commonwealth. The reporter said the money will be used to "double track" the route. Of course, the entire route is already at least double tracked. It will add more sidings and interlockings however. Trackage at Pittsburgh "Union Station" also will need quite a bit of work.
With inflation, $200 million is worth what it used to be.
I mean, they're doing a subway station upgrade (including ADA compliance) in New York for $60 million. That's just one subway station. OK, it's in New York, true, which has some of the highest construction costs in the country, if not the world, but still, $60 million for one station.
If that is what happened, it's a lesson to NOT follow.Amen to that!
That route is on Amtrak's ConnectsUS map, so it may happen someday before 2035.
That would indeed be great. Unfortunately the facilities available at CLE are conducive to turning a train there. Such a train would probably have to go all the way to Toledo to be viable given the current infrastructure availability.
Base tunnels in Europe are inordinately expensive and tend to get built on routes with large number of trains. As in typically multiple trains an hour.
Wasn't at least the Gotthard Base Tunnel justified significantly by the need to get transit trucks ff the roads and onto trains to remove pollution and CO2 emission? Of course the fact that the railroad is electrified was an important component of that argument, which in general is not available in the US.
If freight trains became part of the justification then the equations change considerably, but that would take American freight operators to buy into the virtues of trying to run more trains and stop losing market share as a business imperative first.
In the case of the Channel tunnel, an important part of the income is actually not from thru trains but from shuttles carrying cars and trucks that are otherwise using the highway system. For this to work there has to be a natural barrier (in this case the water). In the case of the Gotthard tunnel there is also a natural barrier (a chain of high mountains with restricted road capacity and adverse conditions in winter on some of those roads) plus also - more importantly - an artificial barrier (Switzerland restricts the number of trucks that may pass per day and makes them pay a lot of money for the priviledge). Switzerland does not shuttle cars on the Gotthard route but there are shuttles for trucks between a terminal in the south of Germany and one in the north of Italy.
It's the most direct route between Chicago and the East Coast. If the line ended at Pittsburgh I'd agree, but it doesn't.
To some extent this argument is a bit of water under the bridge since PennDOT and NS have already struck a deal to spend something like $200 Million to add trackage and universal crossovers at various places as precondition for adding a second train. Allegedly adding a third train should not require any further work, but then a new management team at NS inevitably could think otherwise, since the whole thing is somewhat capricious IMHO. But at least there is a somewhat more activist STB overseeing this process now.
The political problem is that Western PA tends to be much more anti-passenger rail than Eastern PA when it comes time to fund anything. Other than that I think it would be really nice. Pittsburgh did have a Commuter service even in the Amtrak era, though funded and operated locally, which of course went bye bye.
