I am not completely familiar with the project (actually, I am not familiar with it at all!) but I will make some guesses for you.
First of all, you got your normal NIMBY and BANANA problems. The tactic is DELAY DELAY DELAY until it dies from the people pushing it getting discouraged. So they demand studies of things like how many precious Desert Turtles will be killed in larger numbers if 4 of the trains on a freight line at capacity are passenger trains instead of freight trains. Or how many birds will be splatted on the windshield of the additional 5-10 round trips a day on a crowded rail line. Heaven forbid we effect the environment negatively in the pursuit of effecting it positively.
Then, you have the politicians who want to get their names in the paper by opposing projects like this. So, like every other successful transit project, this will have no ridership, be a complete white elephant, and lose more money per year than the complaining politician spends on his daily expense account.
Most of the problems are of the above nature- stupid, political, and resulting from the flawed thinking behind democratic government. What our forefathers failed to realize is that people are so stupid, they don't know what they want. They want what they are told they want.
However, and I don't know PA's full financial situation, the reality is that we are in a financial situation that is best described as dire. Wall Street says we've recovered and turned the corner, but that's not what the world I see around me tells me. States have no money to do anything, and I doubt Pennsylvania is the exception to that rule. Resultantly, I would suspect that the project is also stalling due to the complete lack of realisitc funding.
As with many things in this country, we treat rail projects unrealistically. We tend to treat them with boolean modifies IS and NOT. We never really consider that the real boolean modifier for rail projects is really OR. We can build a commuter rail system to handle 20,000 commuter each day OR we can expand the road infrastructure around our area to handle 20,000 people worth of additional vehicle traffic at peak.
We can build the $10 billion 2 tube, single track per tube and expanded station capacity ARC tunnel project OR we can build a $15-20 billion 6-8 lane multi structure Hudson River crossing to suplement the 5 lanes that currently adequately serve the vehicle crossing needs of the North River. Either way, in 30 years we are going to have a quarter of a million more people crossing the North River, and we need to build the infrastructure to do it.
So it boils down to idiocy, misunderstanding of reality, and political childishness. Just like everything else.
Pop some popcorn, sit back, and watch the project happen or not happen over a period of time. It will progress with all of the alacrity and urgency of a glacier moving.
(That rolleyes is for NIMBYism in the heart of Manhattan, not you.)
