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EXTRA SOUTH
THE ECONOMY IS BAD, organized anti- rail efforts are well-financed, the atmos- phere for serious expansion plans appears rather forbidding, and there are indications on the federal, state, and local level that old issues (thought to have been settled) will have to be revisited. That, however, is not slowing down certain notable efforts to ex- pand rail service. Such endeavors, in both- freight and passenger service, are proceed- ing on the assumption that we will fight whatever battles are to be fought whenever push comes to shove. To what extent the plans described below actually come
to
fruition is an open question, as some HSR projects have been sidelined
On the passenger side, some visionaries north of New York have been conducting a “comprehensive planning study” of six possi- ble new train station locations on the cur- rently freight-only Housatonic Railroad. Those facilities would accommodate the north end of a proposed New York City to Pittsfield, Mass., conventional speed rail passenger line. The stations would be locat- ed between Sheffield, Conn., and Pittsfield. Hopefully the new service could become a re- ality in five to eight years. The rail lines al- ready exist. The Housatonic Railroad, a line with a storied history, was originally char- tered in 1836 and today the railroad oper- ates 161 miles of freight trackage. “The real exciting part of this project,” ac- cording to economist Stephen Sheppard, who conducted the study, is that the need for public subsidies would be held to a mini- mum, applying only to capital costs. The railroad expects to carry its operating ex- penses through ticket sales.
An Unscheduled, Unhurried Look At Dixie Steam Railroading
From the famous to the obscure, Extra South ex- plores the days of steam railroading in Dixie. Starting with the Wreck of Old 97 and continuing to the Tweetsie, H. Reid weaves the tales of the railroads and railroaders
in an entertaining and delightful fashion. The book concludes with a selection of black & white pho- tographs of main lines and short lines taken by John Krause, William S. Young and others. C00053 $21.95 + s&h
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In an interview with R&R, Colin Pease, Vice President for Special Operations for the Housatonic, envisioned the new train will attract tourists, employees of Berkshire companies doing business in New York and Connecticut, second-home owners traveling to and from their Berkshire retreats, and service industry employees commuting be- tween Pittsfield and Great Barrington. Mr. Pease is very enthused about the prospects for his railroad’s proposed new venture. “Our studies indicate a very strong preference for northbound customers com- ing out of New York to have access to recre- ational markets in the Berkshires,” he told us. The passenger cars would accommodate bicycles in the warm weather and skis in wintertime — both in the same car where the passenger is seated.
Some trains would meet Metro-North
trains for a convenient cross-platform trans- fer to New York. Others would carry the passengers on a slightly different route all the way to Grand Central Terminal. Key points in the planning process for all this might be Danbury, Conn., and Brewster, N.Y., on Metro-North’s Harlem line. The trains would also connect with Amtrak’s Lake Shore at Pittsfield for east-west service and at Stamford for the Northeast Corridor. Mr. Pease and Housatonic CEO John Han-
lon envision eight trains a day in each direc- tion, possibly running seven days a week.
Speaking of Florida: An Update
If memory serves, no serious non-Amtrak in- ter-city passenger train plan in the Amtrak era has exceeded the ambition embodied in the Miami-Orlando project undertaken as a privately financed venture by Florida East Coast Industries (FECI).
The CEO of All-Aboard Florida (the pas- senger operation slated to run over part of FECI’s freight subsidiary Florida East Coast) promises his company’s plan will “revolutionize travel between the two cities [with intermediate stops in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach]. FECI will own and operate the service. In fact, Husein Cumber told the Miami Herald the project will build a landmark train station in downtown Mia- mi. (The original station at the site was built by the legendary Henry Flagler.) The de- signers for the facility will be SOM, the com- pany now building the new Freedom Tower, which will collaborate with local Miami ar- chitects. FECI’s real estate arm owns nine acres of fallow land around the station site which is ripe for mixed-use development. Some 50 million people live along the Mi- ami-Orlando corridor, with a “pent-up” de- mand for train service. Business travelers will take advantage of the new “financially viable” service, Cumber believes. Eventual- ly, the project could be expanded west to Tampa and north to Jacksonville. He promises that the 230-mile stretch be- tween the two endpoints (too short a dis- tance for air travel and too far to drive) will offer decent amenities such as “quality meal service” en-route. The train, he argues is “a happy medium.”
Amtrak — on a different route — offers
twice daily service between Miami and Or- lando, but those long-distance trains are heavily patronized by out-of-state passen- gers and require five hours to complete that portion of the trip, as opposed to FECI’s pro- jection of three hours and three minutes. Un- like the publicly-funded rail project rejected last year by Governor Rick Scott as too ex- pensive, the FEC service is not considered “high-speed,” although it will be fast enough to easily beat the travel time by auto. “It would be a very exciting development,” Cumber believes. “Going back to the future, so to speak, to the very thing that made the Flagler rail line would be very dramatic. [As] Nero said, ‘Look, we’re becoming a real city.’ It reflects the reality of Miami and the diversification of the economy here that we have a growing, sophisticated population ea- ger to take rail.”
This is a project worth monitoring. A pri- vately owned and operated passenger rail line in the United States (or almost any- where in the world for that matter) in the early 21st century? That is big. If it suc- ceeds, a lot of conventional wisdom about the economics of running passenger trains will be torn to shreds.
Rail Pushes Big Plans Despite Uncertainty
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