Is Passenger Rail Finally Leaving the Station?

Could it be that there is life in passenger rail in the Old Dominion after all? Such could be the good news now that the Commonwealth Transportation Board has agreed to spend $25.2 million over the next three years to add two new passenger trains from Washington -- one to Richmond and the other to Lynchburg.

The board wants to see how ridership goes. Lynchburg already has one daily train, descendant of the famed Crescent which raced from D.C. to New Orleans. The Lynchburg route starts in October and another extra will go from Richmond to D.C. in December.

Hats off to Norfolk Southern for agreeing to put up 30 percent of the $41.5 million cost to improve both passenger and rail service in Lynchburg which is easing the deal. Now if CSX will improve its north-south artery through Richmond and clean up chronic delays at the Acca Yard, the Old Dominion could really be high-balling along.

Suddenly, there finally seems to be movement on passenger rail. A little more than 15 months ago, I quoted Norfolk Southern CEO Charles W. Moorman as saying that the cold reality was that the the political will didn't exist to boost passenger rail. Freight carriers like NS and CSX must tend to their principal responsibilities of improving shareholder value and they do that by providing good freight service. Only Amtrak offers national passenger routes.

I got fried for running Moorman's comments as BR's intrepid readers thought I was dissing passenger rail. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Anyone who knows me well realizes that I am a "foamer" or an individual so enamoured with choo-choos that I start foaming at the mouth when I hear the mournful horn of a diesel. When I had a basement I had a sizeable HO layout and long to rebuild one.

How to explain the turnaround on rail? Part of it comes from Barack Obama's push for massive infrastructure improvements and the federal and state spending to pull it off. He's got my vote on this. America's and Virginia's rail, port, highway, water and sewer and electrical systems badly need upgrades. The last time the U.S. launched any serious major infrastructure project was the 1950s when Dwight Eisenhower started Interstates.

Broadband also needs to reach out to rural parts of the state since big-time carriers like Comcast tend to wire up wealthier middle class neighborhoods and suburbs first because they can bundle Net, digital TV and digital phone service into one expensive and profitable package. Poor rural and inner city folk may need broadband to start up a business, but they can't spend upwards of $200 a month buying Starz, TMC and ESPN, too. Maybe some relief is on the way.

The rising popularity of infrastructure improvements is based in part on getting out of the recession but it is suddenly in vogue and that is breaking some political barriers to thinking about the possibilities of rail. The shift in thinking is becoming evident as "pay as you go" and "public private partnership" ideas so popular since the 1990s with neo-cons and other conservatives suddenly seem so yesterday and so limited. They might be fine for a small stretch of superhighway or a bridge (entailing lots of patterns of human settlement issues well known on BR) but they can't really do much to bring on rail and all of its benefits.

And, you have to wonder just how these deals are funded and how much the foreign highway operators back in Sydney or Barcelona can raise tolls to meet their debt obligations. Unless the Australians and Spaniards who often run such public-private projects are geniuses at financial planning -- and the current crisis has shown that very few are -- Average Joes commuting by car to work are just going to avoid their highways and bridges if they jack up the prices too much. Then, they go bust, dashing hopes that private enterprise and not government is the salvation for everyone and everything.

Rail is a perfect alternative to a lot of these problems. Improvements require massive amounts of money but the rail fares will be cheap and the trips less polluting. To be sure, the steps so far are tiny and they will require public funding.

Virginia has a great tradition of railroading and some of the first ever roads went through the Old Dominion. The Confederacy was saved for a while by the old Wilmington and Weldon that ran war supplies to Richmond from blockade runners docking in the Cape Fear, N.C. area. Famous passenger trains include the Chesapeake & Ohio's "George Washington" that ran from Newport News and D.C. to points West, Norfolk & Western's bullet-nosed "Powhatan Arrow" and, of course, Southern Railways' "Southern Crescent."

Could trains like that ever come back? One can only dream.

Peter Galuszka

CALL FROM A FRIEND -- WHAT DID I TELL YOU

This is no time to celebrate.

EMR got a call from a friend this week. They opened with:

“Glad to catch you, I thought you might be on a victory tour in the Carribean or Southern Europe – too cold for Canada or Northern Europe.”

?Why so; What celebration?

“Well you have a lot to celebrate. I have known you for 20 years and over that time and especially in the last eight years you have been railing against folks that are now taking their lumps”

?Who is that?

“Well the list is long:

“Auto manufacturers (and their ad agencies) who have been misleading citizens about the use cars and the Mobility and Access Crisis. Now they are headed for bankruptcy – OK the ad agencies are still raking it in but not for long.

“The shelter industry that has been offering and financing the Wrong Size House in the Wrong Location is in deep trouble for neglecting to address the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis.

“Developers that have been putting up orphan subdivisions with a 7-11 and calling it “new urbanism” are going down. How about General Growth Properties! What a name! And then there all the jack-legs building on 10 acre lots and Toll Brothers of the world who build “estates”... All major contributors to the Helter Skelter Crisis.

“Even Wal*Mart is postponing opening stores, has rolled out a 15,000 sq foot store and is taking the advise of its green advisers and is trying to improve its image.

“The real estate market – especially for McMansions and for ‘starter homes’ in orphan subdivisions – is in the gutter – 30 straight months of decline.

“OK it is going down in some places but not everywhere. Citizens who followed your advice and invested in shelter near jobs and services and then went further and invested time and effort in their Dooryard and Cluster and in their schools and in “neighborhood watch” are doing OK and some are doing very well.

“Even the new census data through June 2008 supports your views.

“Finally, the last two federal elections have wiped out a lot of those who have been selling the environment and the Bay (and the air and the oceans) down the drain to support “growth”

OK, I get your point.

Back early last fall Fahmah, who had recently read and edited Volume I of The Shape of the Future said something similar. “You must feel pretty good that all the things you predicted in your book in 2000 are proving true.”

EMR thanked Fahmah for the complement but should have amplified it by what he told the recent caller:

THIS IS NO TIME TO CELEBRATE.

A lot of good citizens are being hurt by the actions they thought were in their best interest but were not because they relied on bad advice and conventional wisdom.

A lot of good Enterprises are suffering through no fault of their own.

Some good Agencies are in trouble because they did not intelligently prepare for the future.

A lot of good Institutions are being stretched to the limit.

This is all because of the greed and ignorance of some “entrepreneurs,” some governance practitioners and a lot of BeliefTank shills who worship at the feet of Business-As-Usual and Politics-As-Usual.

Citizens are attacking the symptoms and the symbols, not the root causes of the turmoil.

The Economists Intelligence Unit (EIU) predicts a ‘global pandemic of unrest.’ Workers at a Caterpillar facility took supervisors hostage because of threatened layoffs. It was the third such incident in France. The EIU report lists 95 potential problem nation-states.

No one warned citizens of the consequences of 35 years of burning through Natural Capital – not the Agencies, not the Institutions and not the media that is now owned by Enterprises.

Almost no one is yet talking about Fundamental Transformation of human settlement patterns, just the result of dysfunction.

Almost no one is yet talking about Fundamental Transformation of governance structure. As long as citizens are suck with a 1790s ideal of a three level governance structure without a rational allocation of control to the level of impact, there will be no improvement.

Almost no one is yet talking about Fundamental Transformation of the economic system. As long as there are agents, brokers and blind investments; as long as there are secret bank accounts, tax havens and tax-free Institutions and as long as there is no fair allocation of costs there is no hope of evolving a real market economy.

There is celebration about getting rid of plastic bags at the grocery store but what about the packaging inside the reusable bags? What about the security of the entire food supply that is dependent on cheap fuel – fertilizer, industrialized farm machinery, transport and the water that cheap fuel can pump from dwindling aquifers?

There is celebration of curly light bulbs and of smart grids but what about the impact of a high voltage grid to bring cheap coal generated electricity to energy hogging distributions of human activity?

There is celebration of green buildings with sod roofs but what about that vast majority of the buildings that are not only dumb but leave the lights on all night which – along with the roadways where Large, Private Vehicles drive with their own lights – light the sky not the places where citizens need to see. What about motion detectors on every light. That would light up the good guys AND the bad guys.

There is celebration of hybrid cars but the ones that Detroit is pushing are full sized SUVs, muscle pickups and $100K battery packs. The plan is to spend most of the stimulus to build and rebuild roadways for vehicles that are not sustainable in settlement patterns that are the root cause of dysfunction.

Conservation organizations are crowing about “saving” 20 percent of the land area in the “best” jurisdictions when the number should be 95 percent. At least some are supporting Regional and Community food chains and opposing Big Grids.

Citizens have been abandoned by the old Fourth Estate as it is swallowed by the Second Estate. There is no Citizen Media on the horizon because no one yet understands how to make money from Citizen Media. As a result citizens do not have the information they need to make intelligent decisions in the Market Place or in the voting booth.

The planning profession is still mired in support of Business-As-Usual and Politics-As-Usual.

No, this is no time to celebrate. But thanks for the call, EMR appreciates those who at least read what he has been writing for two decades.

EMR