As 110 mph trains approach reality, 220 mph seems possible

Springfield may not be a suburb of Chicago, but efforts are afoot to make practical, daily commuting between the two cities – and other Illinois cities – a reality. And it would only take a rail system almost three times as fast as current high-speed trains, at a cost nearly equal to the entire fiscal year 2019 state of Illinois budget.

“If you could get the Chicago to Springfield trip down to less than two hours with hourly service, that will completely change people’s view on traveling,” said Rick Harnish, executive director of the Midwest High Speed Rail Association (MHSRA). “Not only will they switch from car to train, but they will also travel more often, and it will really change Springfield’s position in the world economy.”

The MHSRA is pushing for commitments to implement 220-mile-per-hour passenger rail service throughout the Midwest. The Illinois portion of the ambitious plan would involve the construction of an all-new, electrified 220-mile-per-hour backbone rail system, upgrades to existing tracks for frequent 90 miles-per-hour service, upgraded or new passenger rail stations, and new locomotives and passenger cars capable of operating at speeds exceeding those experienced by drivers at the Daytona 500.

This isn’t the 79-mile-per-hour “high-speed” rail that’s currently being expanded on several of Amtrak’s Illinois routes. This is ultra-highspeed rail, and the MHSRA says it could mean fast, easy access to all parts of Illinois that would revitalize small and medium-sized cities in the state.

The association claims the higher speed rail service would mean a $13.8 billion annual increase in business sales in Chicago alone, $1.9 billion in annual time savings versus driving or flying, a $6.4 billion reduction in annual vehicle miles traveled and 2,615 fewer automobile accidents per year with 43 fewer traffic deaths. The system would also reduce CO2-equivalent emissions by 3.3 million metric tons each year, according to the MHSRA.

“I rode these kinds of trains in Turkey recently. Vietnam is building one. Morocco’s and Saudi Arabia’s will open this year. Spain and France have already connected an area bigger than the Midwest. And China has a large network,” said Harnish, who added that California is already working on its own super-high-speed rail system. “The trains are so smooth at speed that water on tables doesn’t move. You have noise similar to an airplane because air is whizzing by that fast, but because the track has to be so precise, the train itself is incredibly smooth and quiet.”

Harnish said the cost to get 220-mile-perhour rail passenger service up and running in Illinois would be between $20 billion and $25 billion for the all-new precise, electrified backbone tracks and upgraded Chicago Metra lines that would bring the service directly from Chicago to Kankakee, Champaign- Urbana, Decatur, Springfield and St. Louis. Upgraded 90-mile-per-hour tracks would serve Bloomington-Normal, Peoria, Alton, Carbondale, Macomb, Quincy, the Quad Cities and Rockford. An additional $8 billion would be needed to build or upgrade passenger rail stations, Harnish said.

The fiscal year 2019 budget passed in May by the Illinois General Assembly totals $38.5 billion. It includes a $50 million appropriation to the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) for rail service. The agency may use $20 million to pay bills related to all rail projects in the state that are eligible for reimbursement by the Federal Railroad Administration. The remaining $30 million will be placed in escrow and used over the next 20 years to maintain high-speed track on the Chicago to St. Louis rail corridor, according to IDOT spokesman Guy Tridgell.

Harnish said a public-private partnership supplemented by passenger fares is the recommended way to fund the ultra-highspeed rail proposal, and no one expects that this would happen overnight.

“One of the things we are asking the state to do is to look really extensively at how much do you have to come up with every year to make this work,” Harnish said. “Federal involvement is a key part of the picture, which means we really need to think about this bigger than just Illinois.”

Once the infrastructure is in place, Harnish said, the new higher-speed rail service would generate an operating surplus because the trains would be used more, carry more passengers, require fewer overnight stays by train crews, and become the go-to method of inter-city transportation.

Tom Schatz, the president of Citizens Against Government Waste, disagrees.

“It is a very difficult project and one that is highly unlikely to be successful. Taking Amtrak as an example of national passenger rail, it was supposed to be profitable and never has been,” Schatz said. “So it makes it really easy to see why a more expensive, higher speed system is also highly unlikely to be profitable.

“I remember President Obama when he came back from Europe said ‘this is great, let’s do it.’ It is something that sounds like it would work but is extremely diffficult in the U.S. because of geography and population,” Schatz said. “It costs more because the current infrastructure has to be redone in order for high-speed rail to succeed. If that had been done about 20 years ago it probably would have been less expensive, although probably still unsuccessful.”

Schatz said the skyrocketing costs the state of California is experiencing with its super high-speed rail project are an example of what could face Illinois if this state chooses to go down that path. He added that maintaining and improving current transportation methods is a better alternative.

“There are a lot of other options for people to get from one place to another,” Schwatz said. “You have buses, regular trains, highways. Airlines are relatively inexpensive compared to what they used to be.”

A 220-mile-per-hour High-Speed Rail Preliminary Feasibility Study, prepared by the University of Illinois for the Illinois Department of Transportation in September 2013, estimated the price tag for the fasterspeed passenger rail system in Illinois would be between $22 billion and $39 billion. The study concluded that the high-speed rail system could be operationally profitable, with those profits transformed “through debt and equity to cover from five percent to 23 percent of the total construction cost.... A public-private partnership with substantial investments of public funds should be explored to make the high-speed rail system a reality,” the report stated.

The U of I report estimated that the ultrahigh-speed rail system would take passengers from downtown Chicago to Champaign in approximately 45 minutes, to Springfield in one hour 18 minutes, and to either downtown St. Louis or Indianapolis in two hours. The report estimated the annual ridership of the system to be between 8 million and 15 million people with trains running every half-hour during peak times and hourly during other times.

The 220-mile-per-hour backbone envisioned by the MHSRA would run along interstate highway corridors where several established freight railroads currently operate. The railroads are noncommittal when it comes to the proposed higher-speed passenger service.

“Special considerations are necessary for high-speed rail service on Norfolk Southern rail corridors,” said Norfolk Southern Corporation director of public relations Susan Terpay. “Passenger trains operating in excess of 79 miles per hour require their own dedicated tracks. Passenger trains operating in excess of 90 miles per hour require their own private right-of-way.”

“Norfolk Southern is pleased to assist states planning for dedicated high-speed rail and will work with planners to insulate those corridors from interference with and from Norfolk Southern freight corridors,” Terpay said.

The Union Pacific Railroad has its eyes set on the ongoing 79-mile-per-hour upgrades.

“Right now we are focused on completing the Illinois High-Speed Rail Program between Chicago and St. Louis, which will provide an efficient, fluid passenger and freight operation,” said Union Pacific Railroad media relations director Kristen Smith.

Amtrak has operated passenger rail service in Illinois since 1971 and is also concentrating on the present when it comes to high-speed rail.

“We already have here in the Midwest some of the highest speed services outside the northeast, where we are routinely going 110 miles per hour in parts of Michigan and Indiana,” Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said. “We have plans through the Illinois DOT to reduce travel times on the Chicago-to-St. Louis route too.”

“The kinds of services that would be going ultra-high speed would be like building new interstate highways. It can be done, but it would take separate infrastructure,” Magliari said. “The existing infrastructure, because it is shared with freight trains, and because of its curvature, is not designed to do the higher speeds that the MHSRA is advocating.”

Congressman Rodney Davis has been a supporter of the ongoing 79-mile-per-hour high-speed rail upgrades, and the Chicagoto-St. Louis Amtrak route cuts a large swath through his central Illinois district.

“I believe that we first have to finish the project that we’ve started,” Davis said. “But if we are ever going to have ultra-high-speed rail, we’ve got to have somebody start thinking about it now.

“At one time there were a lot of folks who thought high-speed rail between Chicago and St. Louis was going to be a pipe dream, but it’s a corridor that I think is actually working,” Davis said. “Many other high-speed rail projects are way over budget, but it’s working in Illinois.”

Davis realizes 79-mile-per service is an entirely different proposition from propelling passengers at almost triple that speed. He’s not necessarily an advocate of ultra-high-speed rail, but does support a thorough investigation of the possibility.

“That discussion on ultra-high-speed rail I don’t think ever starts too early because this is an opportunity to begin planning ahead for what’s going to work, what’s best,” Davis said. “I took a 200-mile-per-hour train from Paris to Brussels for a meeting at NATO headquarters last summer, and that service is well-recognized in many countries. It’s a service that if we could move it forward in a cost-effective manner, and the passenger ridership would allow it, we ought to think about it.”

IDOT is the lead agency in the state’s highspeed rail infrastructure development along the 284-mile-long Chicago to St. Louis corridor.

“Construction on Chicago to St. Louis is nearly complete,” said IDOT’s Tridgell. “The remaining work includes installing fence on the south end of the corridor near Alton, upgrading crossings and installing fence in Springfield, and finishing construction of a new bridge over the Kankakee River near Wilmington.”

Tridgell said IDOT continues to work with Amtrak to install the software necessary for Positive Train Control implementation on the new locomotives that began to be put into service last year, and passengers should soon experience slightly faster speeds.

“We anticipate maximum speeds will increase from the current 79 miles per hour to 90 miles per hour by the end of this year,” Tridgell said. “There are currently no plans to implement speeds higher than 110 miles per hour in Illinois. Should federal funding become available in the future, the department would consider moving forward with preliminary engineering and environmental studies. But, again, nothing is planned at this time.”

If current passenger trains can run 110 miles per hour, why can’t they just go faster? Besides the problem with track construction and geometry, the MHSRA’s Harnish said simple physics is at work.

“The 220-mile-per-hour trunk line has to be electrified,” Harnish said. “Diesel locomotives are actually electric locomotives where they carry their power plant with them. You get to the point where the power plant has to be too big to go with you as you get faster and faster. That break point appears to be about 125 miles per hour.”

“The locomotives and cars have to be much lighter and safer, and our safety regulations in this country are way out of date,” Harnish said. “The European trains are actually much safer in addition to being lighter and less expensive to build and operate. So it really does mean moving to a modern standard for trains.”

Railroad crossing safety is another issue, one which Harnish said could be dealt with by locating the majority of the ultra-high-speed rail track close to interstate highway rightsof-way. And speaking of interstate highways, Harnish said those multilane, controlled-access roads first developed in the 1950s demonstrate that where there’s a transportation will, there’s a way.

“We haven’t done something on this scale since we built I-55.” Harnish said. “But we did in fact build I-55 and I-72 and I-57, so it’s something we certainly can do.”

Let’s assume that 220-mile-per-hour passenger rail service becomes a reality in Illinois at some point in the future. What do current passenger train riders think of the idea? A recent visit to the Springfield Amtrak station, where dozens of passengers waited for a train that was already 45 minutes late, elicited mixed reactions to the prospect.

“I would probably use it more, but at my age I don’t know if that’s going to be a possibility because I don’t know how far in the future that’s going to be,” said Joliet resident Wilma Bass, who has done a lot of train travel recently in Illinois and Texas. “I would probably travel more by train. Joliet has that kind of service now, they just don’t have the train to go with it.”

“We have a fast-paced world and people are always in a hurry to get somewhere and the generation coming up now is very young and they can’t wait to go different places, so I’m sure this could be a big benefit for them,” Bass said.

Owen Peters, a volunteer with the Rails and Trails Program, a partnership between Amtrak and the National Park Service, is a frequent train traveler on the St. Louis to Chicago route.

“Long distance trains going 220 miles per hour is fine, you’d get there faster, but this particular route, I don’t think so,” Peters said.

“How are they going to make all of the stops they currently make? There’s a lot of stops, and going 220 miles per hour, you slow the train down, offload passengers, it doesn’t seem feasible to me.”

“The tracks have been upgraded on this route to 79 miles per hour and it’s smoother and faster, but the trains still aren’t getting here on time,” Peters said. “High-speed trains might be in the future, but on this particular corridor, I’m not so sure they’d work.”

Diane Buttitta of Des Plaines, who travels periodically by train, has safety concerns about increasing train speed.

“The advantage would be taking less time to go from place to place,” Buttitta said. “The disadvantage would be the severity of injuries if there was a crash at the higher speed.”

Breahna Koprek, a Decatur native who lives in Chicago, travels frequently by rail.

“It’s cheap but it takes an awfully long time and there’s a lot of stopping involved,” Koprek said.

She summed up the feelings of many of the waiting passengers about potential 220-mile-per-hour passenger rail service.

“If I could get someplace quicker that would be nice,” Koprek said.

David Blanchette is a freelance writer from Jacksonville and is also the co-owner of Studio 131 Photography in Springfield.