By Keith Benman, Times of Northwest Indiana
keith.benman@nwi.com
A local high-speed rail proponent said funding for a $71.4 million project to improve passenger rail service through Northwest Indiana is expected to be green-lighted in an announcement today from top White House officials.
The White House Office of Legislative Affairs said in a Wednesday memo to Indiana officials the Indiana Gateway project has been selected for inclusion in $8 billion in stimulus awards for national high-speed rail projects, said Dennis Hodges, founder of the Indiana High Speed Rail Association.
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will travel to Florida today to unveil the first winners in the competition for the stimulus funds, the White House has announced.
Federal Railroad Administrator Joseph Szabo, Obama's point man on high-speed rail, told The Times earlier in the week the project is "critical" to improving rail service between Detroit and Chicago.
"That is a very, very important project," Szabo said Monday. "I have ridden that service (Amtrak) from Michigan to Chicago, and that is a critical bottleneck."
The Indiana Department of Transportation in August applied for the $71.4 million in stimulus funds to alleviate the bottleneck, while the state of Michigan applied for $833 million to build the bulk of a Chicago-to-Detroit high-speed rail corridor.
On Friday, Szabo and transportation officials from five states are coming to Gary/Chicago International Airport in what is being billed as a "leadership luncheon" in support of the proposed 3,000-mile Midwest Regional Rail System. The event will be hosted by the Indiana High Speed Rail Association.
Hodges said Wednesday he'd been advocating for 19 years for a high-speed rail system between Chicago and Detroit.
"This bodes well for that to happen," Hodges said.
Szabo on Monday was effusive in his comments about the Indiana Gateway project.
"If you want high-quality service from Detroit to Chicago, you have to fix Porter, Ind.," Szabo said.
The Indiana Gateway project would extend from key railroad interlocks at Porter all the way to the Indiana/Illinois state line. Most of the right-of-way is owned by freight railroad Norfolk Southern Corp., with about 87 freight trains per day running on its tracks. Amtrak runs 14 trains daily over the tracks, which the application states is the most delay-prone intercity rail passenger corridor in the nation.
Two months after submitting its Indiana Gateway application, INDOT applied for $2.8 billion in stimulus money to build a Chicago-to-Cleveland high-speed rail route with Gary/Chicago International Airport as a proposed station stop. That route also would use the proposed Indiana Gateway.
Eliminating that bottleneck is important to both the proposed Chicago-to-Detroit high-speed corridor and the proposed Chicago-to-Cleveland corridor, Hodges said.
The idea of a multimodal transport station including high-speed rail at the Gary airport first was proposed by the Indiana High Speed Rail Association in 1996. Since then, it has remained mainly a pipe dream.
According to INDOT's application, a station at the Gary airport would create 400 to 650 jobs.
The Federal Railroad Administration has received 45 applications from 24 states totalling $50 billion for high-speed rail corridor programs. The federal agency said distributing the $8 billion in available stimulus funds will be merit-based.
Building a Chicago-to-Detroit corridor where trains could run at consistent speeds of up to 110 mph would cut the travel time between the two cities to four hours and 22 minutes from its current six hours and 24 minutes, according to estimates prepared by the nine-state Midwest Rail Initiative. An improved Chicago-to-Cleveland corridor would chop two hours off that trip.