St Louis high-speed rail link to Chicago breaks ground
Work on the high-speed rail link between St Louis and Chicago has begun, signalling the first step of a mammoth project that is intended to ultimately see Chicago become the hub of a national high-speed railway network that will change the nature of overland transport in the country.
The St Louis-Chicago Rail Connection is significant in itself though. The project will cost over $1 billion and will see old railway lines replaced with track capable of handling high-speed trains, while many miles of new track will be built as well. The project is forecast to create thousands of new jobs during its construction and will provide tangible economic benefits for two of the Mid West’s biggest cities, according to government officials.
St Louis news media recently reported on the groundbreaking ceremony for the first phase of the link between Alton and Lincoln, a 90 mile section of track the needs to be upgraded. The work will cost around $98 million and is expected to see 900 job opportunities created.
Once complete, the high-speed rail link between St Louis and Chicago will enable trains to travel at around 110 miles per hours and will increase the passenger ridership from 500,000 to 2 million due to the increased capacity engendered by faster trains.
The groundbreaking was big business for St Louis, but also received some national attention as it is the first concrete step taken to begin building a national high-speed railway network. There is much talk about high-speed railways at federal and state level around the country, but all of the plans are currently only in the proposal or planning stages, St Louis’ connection to Chicago is the first one to actually start construction.
The first phase and much of the complete rail link, will be funded through stimulus legislation enacted to encourage investment in the country’s infrastructure, which will ultimately benefit local economies and see greater investment in cities with better passenger and freight connections to the rest of the country.
The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act is funding the project as part of a national $8 billion allocation for high-speed rail, of which St Louis has received $1.1 billion for the Chicago line. An additional $31 million was awarded to the state of Missouri for upgrades and improvements to the railway between St Louis and Kansas City.
High-speed rail has become the backbone of overland mass transport systems in most developed countries with highly-developed nations such as Japan, the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain implementing the system extensively. The United Kingdom, for example, has 113 kilometers of high-speed railway in operation making it one of the most extensive relative to its size, while Spain has even more with 1,600 kilometers of high-speed rail links between its cities and a further 2,000 kilometers under construction.
The 110 mile per hour speed of the St Louis-Chicago connection is rather modest in comparison to the Japanese high-speed railways network which runs at around 150 to 200 miles per hours, but nonetheless it will cut the rail commute time between the two cities by an hour and a half, reducing the transit time to just 4 hours.
The United States has been slower to adopt high-speed rail because of a lack of demand following World War Two when fuel was not expensive and there was more demand for cars and road improvements. During this time, Europe and countries like Japan were investing in their rail networks.
With energy costs on the rise and air travel becoming increasingly expensive and uncomfortable, there is a growing interest in overland transport. It is hoped that the high-speed network being developed in the Mid West will return the region to the prominence it had in terms of national land travel in the 1930s and 40s, for many rail enthusiasts it is an interesting prospect and brings back memories of the Twin Cities 400 that used to thunder along between Chicago and Minneapolis at over 100 miles per hour.
The current national railway network is capable of speeds up to 70 or 80 miles per hour, with most trains operating somewhere in-between 50 and 80, which vastly reduces the capacity and efficiency of the network. The current plan for high-speed rail in the Mid West is called the Chicago Hub network and will cost around $8 billion to build in its entirety with over 3000 miles of track connecting all the major cities of the region to one another with core and secondary routes.
When finished the network is expected to carry around 13 million passengers and it is hoped that construction will be complete by 2025.
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St Louis high-speed rail link to Chicago breaks ground
St Louis, Chicago and the state governments of Missouri and Illinois have taken the first step in constructing the Mid West Hub of high-speed rail connections with the building of a high-speed line between the two cities which will quadruple capacity and spur economic development, according to proponents of the high-speed rail line.
Work on the high-speed rail link between St Louis and Chicago has begun, signalling the first step of a mammoth project that is intended to ultimately see Chicago become the hub of a national high-speed railway network that will change the nature of overland transport in the country. Read more
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