EMAIL DETAILS

Think this is what you both were referring to on our call yesterday. AMTRAK
car upgrade coming

by BOB PRIDDY on AUGUST 12, 2011

in HUMAN INTEREST <http://www.missourinet.com/category/human_interest/>,
TRANSPORTATION <http://www.missourinet.com/category/transportation/>

People riding AMTRAK trains will be riding in some brand new cars—but not
right away.

The passenger cars AMTRAK uses between Kansas City and St. Louis are 25 to
50 years old. They’ve been refurbished a time or two, but the outer shell
is old. The Federal Railroad Administration is giving the consortium of
Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, and Iowa 268-million dollars to buy the next
generation of locomotives and cars.

But we won’t see them for two or three years. State transportation
department railroads director Rod Massman says AMTRAK does not even know how
many companies can build the cars yet.

He says the cars will hold ten to 25 percent more passengers, a good thing
because AMTRAK ridership hit 190,000 in the last fiscal year.

Massman says the new cars will be capable of going 125 miles an hour because
that’s the Illinois high-speed service planned for the Chicago to St. Louis
is to go 110. Missouri’s AMTRAK speed will remain 79 miles an hour, tops,
although the department hopes to develop a test section of track near Kansas
City that will allow trains to go 90-miles an hour..


--
Mike Muldoon
Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC
1010 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Suite 705
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 333-1880
mmuldoon@rosemontseneca.co