(The following article by David Patch was posted on the Toledo Blade website on January 24.)
TOLEDO, Ohio — State budget cuts that could lead to the Ohio Rail Development Commission’s dissolution have an advocacy group worried that it will derail planning for a passenger-rail network linking Ohio’s major cities with one another, Pittsburgh, and Detroit.
“It’s ironic that the governor would consider breaking up the rail commission as a cost-cutting measure because the Ohio Hub plan is fundamentally about creating jobs and boosting the state’s economy,” Dominic Liberatore, president of the Ohio Association of Railroad Passengers, said in a statement decrying the idea.
Mark Rickel, a spokesman for Gov. Bob Taft, said it is too early to say whether the rail commission will be disbanded, as suggested in a draft budget the governor’s office issued last week.
“We’re going into a very tight budget, and there are a lot of different things on the table,” Mr. Rickel said. “Right now, there are no done deals.”
The Ohio Hub is a proposed network of passenger rail lines radiating from Cleveland to Pittsburgh, Toledo and Detroit, and Columbus and Cincinnati. A second tier of routes in the plan would link Columbus with Toledo, Pittsburgh, and Lima and Fort Wayne, Ind., and add a route from Cleveland to Buffalo.
For decades, passenger trains have had only a minimal presence in Ohio as travel in the state focused on highways and air service. All four of the Amtrak lines that now cross the state operate primarily at night so that their trips between Chicago and the East Coast begin and end in the daytime. The train through Akron and Fostoria is to stop running on March 6, and the line through Cincinnati only runs three times a week in each direction.
The Ohio Hub plan proposes multiple trains each way between endpoints, with top speeds starting at 79 mph and increasing during later phases. The system would connect at its extremes with proposed networks based in Chicago, upstate New York, and Pennsylvania.
Besides reviving rail as a passenger travel option, corridor development would improve freight service in Ohio by expanding and improving track, adding new signal systems, and replacing grade crossings with bridges, Jim Seney, the rail commission’s executive director, said during Ohio Hub “roll-out” meetings last year.
The rail commission has pegged the initial system’s cost at $3.4 billion, which Mr. Seney has said might be secured from the federal government using funds Ohio spends to improve railroad-highway grade crossings as a local match. So far, however, little rail development money has been available from Washington.
To go beyond being just an idea, the Ohio Hub “needs support in Columbus and Washington,” Mr. Liberatore said. “It’s up to our legislators to implement the hub plan, to secure the capital dollars.”
Mr. Seney said Friday that he expects to know within a week what the fate of his agency will be. If it is abolished, he said, its functions will be assigned to the Ohio Department of Development and the Ohio Department of Transportation, with passenger-rail development likely to go to ODOT.
The rail passenger group’s statement said the group could find such change “acceptable” if the Taft administration assures the public that a new agency would pursue the Ohio Hub plan aggressively.