Lehigh Valley taking major step to get 'on board' with passenger rail services
The Lehigh Valley is getting on-track to bring back passenger rail services, announcing Wednesday the first major step in order to move forward.
The Lehigh Valley Transportation Study announced it's partnering with PennDOT to conduct a passenger rail analysis. The first-of-its-kind analysis of the region will meet the federal government's requirement to apply for funding with the Federal Railroad Administration.
There's around $66 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure bill for passenger rail.
"In the most basic sense of the word. No study, no rail,” said Executive Director of the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission, Becky Bradley, who is also secretary of the LVTS.
"First we have to figure out what the appropriate route could be. Is it a route to North Jersey and New York? Is it a connection to Philadelphia or to Harrisburg, or some combination thereof? What's the strategy? Then we would identify rail partners. Is that partner New Jersey transit? Is it SEPTA? is it Amtrak? is it LANTA?"
The study will also forecast potential ridership, initial capital investments, and ongoing operational costs.
"So, getting this information now and getting it lined up is going to be important in the future,” said Jennie Louwerse, Deputy Secretary for Multimodal Transportation for PennDOT.
PennDOT is paying around $300,000 for the study.
“Most of the concepts that I've seen so far for this area involve sharing rail with freight rail and that brings its own set of challenges,” Louwerse said.
While we don't know what the cost might be yet, a similar analysis done in Reading of a smaller potential rail network to Philadelphia clocked in at around $800 million, before inflation.
"Again, the math has to work in terms of ridership. In terms of building a system, operations, maintenance,” Bradley said.
The analysis will take probably about 12 months, maybe a little longer. Once they get that data, then they can either decide to move forward with a plan or not and submit it for federal funding.
It could take a decade or longer to actually get the service running.