Plan to change busy Northeast rail corridor moves ahead
Federal officials are moving ahead with a plan to reinvent the northeast rail corridor by 2040, including a proposal to connect Long Island to New England via a new high-speed rail link across the Long Island Sound. Credit: Howard Schnapp
Federal officials are moving ahead with a plan to reinvent the northeast rail corridor by 2040, including a proposal to connect Long Island to New England via a new high-speed rail link across Long Island Sound.
The Federal Railroad Administration on Wednesday held the first of a series of open houses on its Northeast Corridor Future initiative, which it says is "a comprehensive planning effort to define, evaluate, and prioritize future investments" along the busy corridor, which stretches from Washington, D.C., to Boston.
The meeting, held in Manhattan, was part of the environmental review process that will include selecting from 15 current proposals to expand and improve the corridor.
One option being considered would link Nassau and Suffolk to the corridor by building a bridge or tunnel across Long Island Sound to New Haven, Connecticut. The proposal would give passengers a one-seat ride from Long Island to New England without the bottleneck of Penn Station.
"We want to make sure that we take into account the market that exists on Long Island. There's no intercity travel that serves Long Island," said program manager Rebecca Reyes-Alicea. She called the Long Island plan one of "the more robust alternatives" being considered. Other, more modest proposals would increase service and capacity along the existing Northeast Corridor spine.
At the open house, longtime rail rider Richard Schulman, of Smithtown, said he'd prefer to see the federal agency focus its efforts on more immediate fixes to the Northeast Corridor, rather than a "pipe dream" proposal to expand it onto Long Island.
"It'll never happen . . . Nobody wants to pay for it," said Schulman, 72, a retired roofer who has traveled more than 90,000 miles on Amtrak trains. "A lot of . . . is ridiculous. Just build something. Get it done quickly."
Federal Railroad Administration officials said although the future initiative does look ahead 25 years, it also aims to make more immediate improvements to the corridor, which moves 365 million passengers a year on century-old infrastructure.
Reyes-Alicea said public input gathered at the open houses would help the federal agency pare down the many proposals.
Dan Schned, senior transportation planner for the nonprofit Regional Plan Association, applauded the federal agency for taking a long-range view of railroad travel in the Northeast.
"Is it realistic that . . . the federal government would opt to spend what would probably amount to over $100 billion? That's probably unlikely given the current political environment," Schned said of building a rail connection across the Sound.
Alfonso Castillo has been reporting for Newsday since 1999 and covering the transportation beat since 2008. He grew up in the Bronx and Queens and now lives in Valley Stream with his wife and two sons.
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