[ardecila]

I'll allow for a little dialogue in the thread, especially since it reveals Scott Walker's hypocrisy about curtailing wasteful spending.

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A recent Greg Hinz blog post said that, in the forthcoming new schedule for the Chi-StL line, there will be five round trips, but only three of them will attain 110mph speeds. The other trains will have to go slowly - probably not much faster than they are today.

Also - I always wondered the reason why the HSR improvements were cut short at Dwight. Turns out the Peotone airport boosters wanted the St. Louis trains to detour through Kankakee up to Peotone. (the improvements should extend north to the edge of Chicagoland, at least, where costly second-tracking and flyovers become necessary).

Greg Hinz sees the recent award of money for tracks north of Dwight as a nail in the coffin for the Peotone rail-access plan, but it's not dead yet (in my best Monty Python voice).

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Has anybody heard anything about the railcar/locomotive procurement? The Midwestern states just got a huge pot of money to buy new trainsets, but so far we only have two Talgo trainsets which may or may not enter service.

There are plenty of local manufacturers... ElectroMotive, Nippon Sharyo, possibly Talgo, etc...