(The following story by Jon Schmitz appeared on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette website on April 26, 2010.)
PITTSBURGH, Pa. — A comprehensive report on the future of rail transportation in Pennsylvania makes no mention of the long-stalled plan to build a magnetic levitation train from Pittsburgh International Airport to Greensburg.
The report, released last week and advertised by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation as “a vision for what Pennsylvania’s rail system could look like in 2035,” targets seven passenger rail corridors for improvements.
The only time the word “maglev” appears in the 44-page overview is in a listing of more than 120 organizations that were invited to provide input for the report, one of which was McKeesport-based Maglev Inc.
PennDOT spokeswoman Erin Waters said the omission was not intended as a commentary on maglev’s future.
“Maglev is a technology. The plan was not mode- or technology-specific. It isn’t endorsing or negating any type of technology,” she said. “Any of those decisions will have to come later as part of separate studies.”
Fred Gurney, president and CEO of Maglev Inc., said he wasn’t surprised — he said he was told the document would focus on conventional steel-wheel-on-rail development.
The omission “is not necessarily welcome news to me,” Mr. Gurney said, while insisting the project remains viable.
The project, conceived nearly 30 years ago, essentially has been at a standstill since a draft environmental impact statement was completed in 2005. The document has yet to receive approval from the Federal Railroad Administration.
A $28 million grant for continued planning of the project was announced with much fanfare by U.S. Sens. Arlen Specter and Bob Casey in September. But the money has not been released, and Mr. Gurney said he doesn’t expect to see any of it in the near term.
The project was shut out of the $8 billion in federal economic stimulus funds awarded to high-speed rail projects by the Obama administration in January.
All of the money went to conventional rail projects. The Obama plan envisions an interconnected national high-speed system, and a Western Pennsylvania maglev line would not easily integrate with such a network.
Another bad omen for maglev came in March, when U.S. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada redirected $45 million that was awarded to a planned Las Vegas-to-Los Angeles maglev line to highway projects. Mr. Reid, a former maglev backer, has switched his preference to steel-wheel trains out of frustration with delays in maglev development, according to published reports.
In their September announcement of the Pittsburgh maglev grant, Mr. Specter and Mr. Casey touted the eventual development of a Pittsburgh-to-Philadelphia maglev line.
But PennDOT has gone in another direction, applying for hundreds of millions of federal dollars for further improvement of the existing Amtrak line from Harrisburg to Philadelphia, with a goal of 125 mph service and a travel time of 1 hour and 20 minutes between the cities.
Amtrak and the state already have invested $145 million to improve that connection, a project that boosted ridership by 74 percent, according to PennDOT. It got another $25.7 million for the corridor in January’s high-speed rail allocations.
PennDOT also received $750,000 for a study into improving service from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh. The study will assess what improvements are needed to increase service from the current one daily round trip to eight, and to increase the speed to 110 mph, similar to service east of Harrisburg.
Currently, passenger trains from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh average less than 50 mph on a line that is congested with freight traffic.
“We are now at a crossroads in our transportation history,” the rail report said. “A new national vision for intercity/high-speed rail is before our nation. New decisions must be made to ensure that the nation as a whole, and Pennsylvania in particular, are positioned to compete in a rapidly changing international marketplace.”