Take a train from Philadelphia to Lancaster or Harrisburg and you’ll be moving as fast as 110 mph.
Take that same train from Altoona or Johnstown to Pittsburgh and the speed could be cut by half.
Train travelers in eastern Pennsylvania have access to 14 daily round trips using greatly improved rails on what is termed the Keystone Corridor. Cambria and Somerset county residents taking a train to Pittsburgh or Harrisburg have access to one round trip daily – Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian.
That 250-mile trip between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh takes about 4 hours by car and 5 1/2 hours by train.
Western Pennsylvania’s rail service is unacceptable for a host of economic and environmental reasons, witnessess said Monday during a congressional field hearing in Pittsburgh.
Christopher Gleason of Johnstown, president of the Gleason Financial Group, was one of 11 people to testify at the hearing led by U.S. Rep. Bill Shuster, R.-Hollidaysburg.
Shuster is the ranking Republican on the Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over the nation’s freight and passenger rail systems.
A longtime advocate of high-speed rail, Gleason called for establishing the Keystone West Passenger Rail Corridor with improvements to the existing line from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg and a link to State College, which he said is an established high-tech center.
He envisions a route running from Pittsburgh to Tyrone over Norfolk Southern lines – the corridor Amtrak now follows – but continuing another 14 miles on the Nittany & Bald Eagle Railroad to Port Matilda in Centre County.
Greyhound Lines could take passengers by bus the remaining
12 miles on Interstate 99 to State College, Gleason proposed.
Centre County is home to the ninth-largest university campus in the country and has about 44,000 students at its main campus in University Park, Shuster said.
The estimated cost of the vastly improved rail service, including improvements for passengers moving between Altoona, Johnstown and Pittsburgh, is $200 million. That includes track and station improvements plus four new self-propelled rail cars, Gleason said.
The project could mirror the Amtrak-state partnership completed in 2006 that enabled pumping $145 million in improvements into the eastern Pennsylvania corridor, which prompted ridership to jump 26 percent, according to Monday’s testimony.
Not only would a commitment to western Pennsylvania improve transportation speed, but it also would help to cut the number of vehicles on the region’s already congested highways and reduce pollution levels.
One 75-foot-wide rail corridor can carry the same number of people per hour as a 16-lane expressway while giving off fewer pollutants and consuming less energy per passenger mile, according to the House subcommittee.
The federal government is dedicating $9.3 billion for passenger rail through its economic stimulus package as part of a $464 billion investment in infrastructure.
The combined Keystone West and Keystone East routes would give the state one of the finest passenger rail systems in the nation, Gleason said.
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