Quote:
Originally Posted by llamaorama
Instead of spending available federal funds on building new rail lines, has any thought ever been given to improving existing lines by re-routing them, grade separations, eliminating curves, relocating stations whose original sites didn't work out, etc?
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The federal Capital Investment Grants (formerly known as New Starts) that most cities use to pay for big new rail lines does indeed have a category of funding for "core capacity" that could in theory be used for this stuff. However, AFAIK all the core capacity money has gone to the big east coast underground rebuilding projects. It would be interesting to see an '80s era light rail system use it.
I suspect that had Dallas gone ahead with their downtown tunnel proposal a couple of years ago, that probably would have used the core capacity fund.