Recommends spending $46 million to double-track the CSX company line between Manville and Trenton.
By: Steve Rauscher
A study commissioned by the I-95 Corridor Coalition has found that the Mid-Atlantic region’s freight rail network is deteriorating rapidly and recommended more than $6.2 billion in improvements, including $46 million to double-track the CSX company line between Manville and Trenton.
The study surveyed the five Mid-Atlantic states Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey as well as southern New York, in an effort to pinpoint the rail network’s "choke points" and develop a strategy to increase its capacity. It paints a picture of a rail network that is overburdened and under-maintained.
"Capacity and congestion problems today are eroding the productivity of the transportation system," the report reads. "Travel time and cost are increasing, service reliability is decreasing, and the ability of the system to recover from emergencies and disruptions is severely taxed."
Experts cite a number of causes for the deterioration, chief among them the shift in transportation spending priorities from rail to roads, and the difficulty of coordinating improvements and sharing costs between states.
"A big part of this study is to get the states to look at this on a consensus basis," I-95 Corridor Coalition President John Baniak said. The coalition comprises a number of public and private transportation interests from East Coast states. "They’ve got to look beyond what’s good and what’s a problem within each state."
The problem within the Mid-Atlantic region, according to the report, is the proliferation of substandard bridges, tunnels, grade crossings and connections, as well as areas of limited capacity, that combine to constrain efficient rail passage. The study identifies 71 "choke points" locations in the network with reduced capacity or operational capabilities compared to the rest of the network where bottlenecks often occur. Thirteen of the points are in New Jersey, including one along the Trenton-Manville line that passes through Montgomery. The study calls for the construction of another set of tracks along the line, where there is currently just a single set.
The cost of the Manville-Trenton line improvement alone is estimated at $46 million. The cost of the entire improvement from Virginia to New York tops $2.6 billion. Given that most of the infrastructure in question is owned by Amtrak as well as the CSX and Norfolk Southern rail companies, and snakes through six states, finding the money to complete the improvements may be the project’s biggest challenge, Mr. Baniak said.
"We have to find a way to find funding on a regional basis," he said. "This study is sort of a first of its kind, and it’s at a very early stage."
Micah Rasmussen, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation, which is one of the member organizations in the coalition, praised the plan but agreed that the funds could prove hard to come by.
"These are intriguing options," he said. "We’re interested in extra freight, because it’s the only way to get the trucks off the roads, which has been our goal, but it now becomes a question of directing money to specific projects and prioritizing. In an ideal world, we’d have the funding for everything."
Most of the improvements proposed in the state fall in the medium to long-term stages of the overall plan. That means they are not priorities, and are unlikely to be completed within the next decade. Mr. Rasmussen said the state has no active plans to build a second track along the Manville-Trenton line.
That line was once home to Montgomery’s Belle Mead train station, which closed in 1982. Township officials have looked at re-opening the station in the past, but passenger service connecting West Trenton and New York through Manville and Bound Brook would require the construction of another track, which, again, seems unlikely in the near future.
"With regard to passenger service, I don’t want anybody to get ahead of themselves," Mr. Rasmussen said. "It’s something that we might do if we had the funds. But right now, that’s a big if."