^^^We'll dress you up as Old King Coal, EX, put a sandwich board on you and take you cross country on a rolling platform. My take will be 15% to manage you plus free 'eats'...
segue to Scrantonia: as to the NYC-Scranton rails thing. Tho Scranton's projected ridership looks unacceptabley poor, Scranton might have an 'ace in the hole' warranting the Scranton link anyway:
01/18/2007
Train stop for city gets boost
BY ROGER DUPUIS II
STAFF WRITER
If they build it, will it stop in Scranton?
“It” is the proposed $551 million passenger train service between Northeastern Pennsylvania and Hoboken, N.J. Plans call for storing and fixing the trains here, bolstering the Electric City’s chances for securing a station stop despite limited passenger boardings, the region’s top rail official believes.
“We do feel the (projected) ridership is very low,” said Larry Malski, chief operating officer of the Pennsylvania Northeast Regional Railroad Authority, which is sponsoring the state’s end of the project. “But locating the storage and maintenance yard here is major factor in bringing the trains to Scranton.”
A environmental study commissioned by New Jersey Transit, which would run the trains, predicts a year 2030 daily ridership of only 40 passengers per weekday from Scranton, just 1.1 percent ?of the estimated 3,520 daily eastbound riders on the line. By contrast, stations in the booming Poconos region could generate nearly 90 percent of the line’s traffic.
Jeffrey D. Stiles, executive vice president of Edwards and Kelcey, an engineering firm that worked on the study for New Jersey Transit, said it is common practice to locate railroad storage and maintenance facilities at the ends of the lines, which eliminates the expensive practice of running off-service trains out to the end of the line to start the day.
And, said Mr. Malski, the Scranton brownfield site eyed for such a yard, used for that very purpose decades ago, is far preferrable to building one in a potentially more residential area of the Poconos.
“It’s been known to kill a project,” he said of ill-planned rail yard placement. “We have the facilities, the infrastructure. It’s been here for 150 years. It’s the ideal place.”
Moreover, changing the rail yard location would require the environmental study process to begin anew, Mr. Stiles said, a costly and time-consuming delay.
That’s clearly not what planners want after years of delays just to reach this point.
New Jersey Transit would like to have its draft environmental assessment, complete with public comment, submitted to the Federal Transit Administration shortly after the March 2 public comment period ends, and hope to have FTA’s response back by this summer.
At a public comment meeting in Scranton on Wednesday, the handful of speakers who addressed the audience seemed broadly in support of the project, with no public outcry against its environmental impact.
Monroe County property owners, who will have their own meeting Jan. 25, are also expected to be broadly in support. In New Jersey, where more property owners may be affected by the line, there could be more concerns, though the study predicts few major impacts — a matter FTA ultimately will rule on.
Ultimately, FTA also will rule on whether Scranton’s projected passenger numbers justify federal funding for the line, a step that will come after the environmental report is approved, and after Pennsylvania and New Jersey officials hammer out how much each state will contribute, not just to construction but also to operation and maintenance.
While Keystone State politicians from Gov. Edward G. Rendell to its Congressional delegation have expressed support for the project, how much they’re willing to contribute remains to be seen.
“There have been preliminary discussions, but no final decisions have been made,” said Jack M. Kanarek, senior director of project development and capital planning for New Jersey Transit.
Those decisions will be necessary before the project can get FTA blessing for the next step, preliminary engineering.
Contact the writer:
rdupuis@timesshamrock.com