A BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL

Not so high speed

IT'S HARD to run a 21st-century railroad with equipment a century old. But
that is what Amtrak is trying to do with its new Acela service from Boston
to New York. The passenger railroad corporation needs more money and better
cooperation from its partners in state government to allow the high speed
service to live up to its early promise.

Three problems are responsible for the frequent delays in Acela service
between Boston and New York last week. Amtrak will quickly install lightning
arresters so that track signals will not be knocked out by summer storms,
and rock slides in Connecticut will be remedied by the fall. But the archaic
wires on the stretch of track between New Haven and New York State will not
be fixed so quickly.

The Connecticut Department of Transportation, which controls this section of
track, is in the midst of a leisurely program to replace the wires, which
will not be completed until 2007. Harry Harris, head of the Bureau of Public
Transportation in the department, gives three reasons for the time lag: the
need to fix bridges at the same time, the difficulty of accommodating
commuter trains on the same track, and a shortage of money. Connecticut is
contributing 20 percent of the cost, with the federal government picking up
the rest, and the replacement work competes with other transportation needs.

These are sound reasons if viewed from a strictly Connecticut point of view.
High-speed service is a greater benefit to people at either end than those
in between. But from a regional perspective the Acela service is essential
to reduce dependence on air and highway travel from New York to Boston and
increase mobility in the Northeast corridor. This will have indirect
benefits for Connecticut if traffic on its clogged interstate highways is
reduced as a result.

Congress is considering a bill to authorize $12 billion in bonds for rail
service around the country over the next 10 years. States would have to put
up a 20 percent match for these bonds.

Harris believes that, had these bonds been available, work on the
electrification update might be going more quickly. Amtrak needs all this
money desperately to fix up a system that has advanced little from the
1930s, and Congress ought to approve the bill this year.

States would be wise to use this money as an incentive to devise regional
approaches to railway issues. At the very least, states should have some
advisory input into projects whose impacts will be felt beyond their
boundaries. The Acela trains are supposed to tie eight states and the
District of Columbia closer together. A common transportation system
requires a constant level of government cooperation.


This story ran on page A14 of the Boston Globe on 7/11/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

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