jstolberg wrote:Amtrak and state officials plan meetings in the coming month on the estimated $4 million to $5 million a year it might cost the state to continue the service. ...
State Rep. Randy Truitt, R-West Lafayette, said community leaders needed to be ready to get involved after Amtrak and Indiana Department of Transportation officials meet.
http://www.pal-item.com/article/2012101 ... CFRONTPAGE
In other words, if the state doesn't agree to put up the money, perhaps Indianapolis, Crawfordsville, Lafayette, Rensselaer and Dyer could. This could become the first COMMUNITY-sponsored intercity passenger rail service.
Interesting that the local cities want to keep the train, even if it does get much not ridership. The challenge is that the Hoosier State loses the most money per passenger mile and seat mile of all the Amtrak trains. Any plans for the communities to provide the funding will take considerable flak for that.
Of course what the Cardinal/Hoosier service needs is better trip times between CHI and IND. It did get some help recently. There was a report several weeks ago in
Railway Age about the completion of CREATE project B15 which modernized signals and switches at a yard and improved track speeds from 15 to 30 mph for the Cardinal and Hoosier State. Quote from the article: "With the improvements, Amtrak trains and freight trains operating on the IHB main line are expected to pass through in as little as six minutes. Trains used to experience 15 to 30 minutes of delay for every hand-operated switch they navigated as well as when waiting for other trains to navigate the project limits with manual switches." So there has been improvement on a small part of the long Cardinal route. A spot check of Amtrak status maps archives shows that the Hoosier State has been getting in early to CHI a number of times recently which might be due in part to the CREATE project completion.
There is this part in the newspaper article that I find odd: "Amtrak says states are responsible for fully funding routes shorter than 750 miles under a funding methodology established by Congress in 2008. But state officials in Indiana disagree." Umm, this was set in the 2008 PRIIA act and is not exactly news to the other states. Maybe IN DOT thinks IN doesn't have to provide a subsidy because the Hoosier State shares a timetable and route with a LD train?