As someone who is nearby the deepest East Coast port and one of the top ports by volume (Hampton Roads), the issue is if Baltimore becomes non competitive, Hampton will gladly eat the volume up, and that is why this project is going to be a thing)
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orulz wrote:That's my point - double stack freight to the port of Baltimore is a parochial issue, rather than a great matter of national interest. It doesn't make a difference, on a national scale, whether cargo comes in through Baltimore or Hampton Roads or Charleston or Savannah or New Jersey or Houston or Wilmington or wherever. We shouldn't be spending $2+ billion of extra federal money so that Baltimore can retain or increase its market share over other east coast ports. This is what happens when decisions are made based on politics rather than empirical cost effectiveness.Can you substantiate this with some evidence? The Class I's are investing big in PoB access, and State of Maryland has well-defined self-interest in funding upgrades (more solidly justified than, say, some of the money the New England states are thinking of spending on deepwater dredging to catch a couple token PANMAX ships on flypaper). It's a little presumptuous that some detached executive decision can be made from above saying, "no, Maryland, we're overruling you on executive orders because Hampton Roads--and the jobs it ends up taking from Baltimore--is a better strategic port for the balance of the lower 48." Maryland's going to sell that to its voters...how again?...when the traffic is swimming around the general vicinity? Their port, their economy, their math that shows it's worth baking that consideration up-front into a tunnel designed to last 100 years. Like it or not, the U.S. is a 50-state union with separation of national vs. state powers. Short of having another Constitutional Convention to re-federalize the whole country, state-level interests matter and are an inseparable component of national initiatives. In times of better-functioning gov't as well as chaotically dysfunctional gov't.
orulz wrote: Redundancy is good, and If freight were out of the picture, two new bores plus a refurbished b&p tunnel would be sufficient redundancy. use. Then let Amtrak/MARC refurb the old B&P to get a third and fourth passenger track.There are some assumptions not based in fact.
Baltimore Amtrak tunnel replacement would cost $4 billion
The Federal Railroad Administration wants to go ahead with a $4 billion project to replace a 143-year-old Amtrak tunnel that passes under West Baltimore and is a major bottleneck in the rail corridor from Boston to Washington.
The agency's preferred route for a new Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel would take it in a wide arc beneath neighborhoods including Reservoir Hill, Penn North and Sandtown-Winchester, displacing 22 homes, five of which are vacant, according to a recently released final environmental impact statement.
The new tunnel would replace the existing 1.4-mile tunnel beneath Bolton Hill and Sandtown-Winchester, allowing more trains to pass through and at faster speeds.
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