A few dozen people have gathered in the early morning chill to catch the Capitol Limited, running to Washington D.C. The train that lumbers into the Amtrak station along the Shoreway in downtown Cleveland, is one of the few that still come to town. A hundred years ago, platforms like this one would be teeming with passengers, says Rail travel booster Ken Prendergast. Back then, he says, a web of electric inter-urban trains would regularly criss-cross Ohio.
Ken Prendergast: You could use them to travel between cities, you could use them to travel regionally -- like between Chagrin Falls and Cleveland, or from Medina to Cleveland. And then, when they got into the cities, then they used the streetcar tracks. So, they were a very flexible way to go. But, they were also very poorly financed.
And when the government started paving roads, commuters started turning toward automobiles. By the end of the 1930s, most of the inter-urbans were gone. Given the relentless rise in gas prices, Prendergast argues that it's time to bring commuter rail back as a transportation alternative in Ohio. He's Director of Research for the advocacy group All Aboard Ohio, which is backing what's called the West Shore Corridor project -- a test line that would run on existing track between Cleveland and Lorain, and possibly even as far as Sandusky.
Ken Prendergast: What we're proposing with the Westshore Corridor Project is that you have this rail line that's in place already. It's in good condition. It's probably the best place in the state of Ohio.
Faced with rising fuel costs of his own, Greater Cleveland Regional Transit chief Joe Calabrese recently decided on a series of budget cuts he'll have to make to keep his trains and buses running in the black. Calabrese says he likes the concept of commuter rail, but he wonders if it's a top priority.
Joe Calabrese: If every transit system in the state is in the process of cutting services, don't we have to be sure that we can operate the services that we have today before we start new services?
Calabrese notes that rail transportation is very expensive to build and operate. Prendergast counters that the Westshore Line could operate with good, used equipment, available at bargain basement prices -- as cities like Nashville have done. Most cities along the West Shore route are backing the plan, though some initially balked at the idea of allowing more trains through their communities. Especially since they had already negotiated an agreement with Norfolk-Southern several years ago to limit freight train traffic. Bay Village Law Director Gary Ebert says it was a groundbreaking deal.
Gary Ebert: That was negotiated in the heat of the merger between CSX and NS and we were able to succeed in getting the only agreement like this, quite frankly, in the country. We just want to make sure that the integrity of the agreement is not jeopardized.
RTA's Joe Calabrese says the current mood in Washington is to fund rail projects that reduce traffic congestion. And, as slow as the morning commute can be sometimes, local congestion hardly ranks with the gridlock that drivers find on the Washington Beltway, or the highways that ring Chicago
Joe Calabrese: That's strike one. Strike two is, The next question the federal government asks is, What's your projected population growth over the next 20 to 30 years, and how much worse is congestion going to be? Well, our answer is, our population is not projected to grow.
But, Ken Prendergast says there's another key criterion that the feds use to rate commuter rail proposals -- do they promote local economic development, like businesses and housing, along the route?
Ken Prendergast: So, we've gone into this thing with the understanding and intention that anything we do here is going to be development-driven along these little nodes along the railroad corridor. We've seen some interest from real estate developers. They say "keep us posted on what you're doing," and that's very encouraging to us.
And so, local rail enthusiasts will keep looking down the track for that funding express from Washington. Meanwhile, the skeptics wonder if that train will ever arrive at the station. David C. Barnett, 90.3.