Stimulate that MARC train!

I saw some good news in the Baltimore Business Journal this week. The Maryland Department of Transportation has applied for $360 million of stimulus funds to be applied to commuter and passenger rail improvements. It's a laundry list of good ideas, many of them discussed the in the strategic plan for the MARC that the MTA put out a few years ago. It's great to see that we might actually get funding for some of these improvements. If this funding comes through it should help with some of the complaints everyone has about train delays and rail capacity issues. The Baltimore Business Journal article has a lot of good information on what they're looking into, but I'll highlight a few that I think are pretty interesting.

The most important is probably the $200 million to replace three bridges in Maryland. The new bridges will be three tracks instead of two, allowing for more high-speed (well, Acela at least) trains and increased passenger train usage overall. This is really an important development because increasing train capacity on these bridges is really vital to expanding train service and improving it's timeliness in the region. This is money that will go directly into engineering and construction over the next couple years and will accomplish exactly what the stimulus was meant to do - keep companies going until the economy recovers and the private sector can provide the business. It's a great opportunity to do some good infrastructure work that we'd like to be doing anyway, but might have to pay a lot more for services if there was more demand.

Maryland's Department of Transportation has also asked for $10 million to install a GPS-tracking system in the trains (sounds a lot like what I was on about on about in my complaining-about-the-MARC post).

In the category of really-important-projects-that-we-need-to-start-immediately-because-they-will-take-FOREVER-to-complete is the work to replace/improve/expand the Baltimore & Potomac (B&P) tunnel in Baltimore. This tunnel is really Baltimore's claim to passenger rail fame right now, because it is the choke point for Amtrak's Northeast Corridor (NEC). Wikipedia has a pretty good write-up on the B&P tunnel and on the original Baltimore & Potomac railroad. Basically, the tunnel was completed in 1873 and aside from some repairs and minor improvements to drainage in the early 1980's, it is essentially a 19th century piece of infrastructure. Pretty amazing when you think about it.

The B&P tunnel is a big problem for passenger rail travel along Amtrak's NEC because, as Amtrak's 2005 report to Congress on rail infrastructure in Baltimore (see page 2-16, Box 2-1) puts it, "A sharp curve at the south portal of the tunnel prevents southbound trains departing Baltimore Pennsylvania Station from accelerating beyond 30 mph. An uphill, milelong, 1.34 percent grade further constrains train performance." That's right, if you've ever thought "Hey, it feels like we're moving really slow," why heading south on the MARC, it's because that's exactly what was happening.

(Aside: That 2005 report is pretty fascinating, if dense, reading. After reading most of it one Sunday afternoon I got a much better appreciation of why we're still using such a difficult tunnel that opened 136 years ago. Turns out it's ridiculously difficult to build infrastructure in the Baltimore area due to geography - the "Fall Line" runs directly through Baltimore. The report was actually commissioned after the 2001 fire in the Howard St. Tunnel (another piece of 19th century infrastructure (completed in 1890)). When the Howard St. Tunnel was shut down due to a derailment, CSX freight trains on the south side of Baltimore had to detour west to Cleveland, north to Albany, and then head back south to reach the north side of Baltimore.)

So, anyway, this application for stimulus funds includes $60 million for studies and engineering on how to improve this tunnel. It's not going to be cheap, actual construction of a new tunnel will be in the billions of dollars. I have to be honest, I'm not super-optimistic we'll see that starting any time soon. Replacing the B&P tunnel will only shift the bottleneck to Baltimore's Union Tunnel on the other side of Penn Station. Although the Union Tunnel would be easier to upgrade because it's shorter and already has three tracks.

Anyway, there's your story for the day on how under-investment in passenger rail for the last 60 years has left us hamstrung now that we're winding down our love affair with the automobile. Don't get me wrong, I don't think we'll ever replace cars with public transit - I'm saying that America really needs more options for transportation. And if we don't start the projects, we'll never finish.

That's why I'm excited about this project, it's the perfect use of fiscal stimulus money. These are projects that you probably want to do anyway but might not get done when the economy is humming along. Once you're in a recession with a gap between possible output and actual demand and you decide you want the government to step in a provide some temporary demand until private demand recovers. Infrastructure projects like this fit the bill because they will improve passenger and freight movement capability and capacity when things begin to pick up again.