Pacific Surfliner Gets $21M To Start On Second Track Thru San Diego
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Creative Commons image of Pacific Surfliner train in Downtown San Diego.
Because several stretches of the rail corridor have only a single track, Amtrak and Metrolink trains must often grind to halt on their way in and out of San Diego while they wait for another train to pass.
After the three projects that received start-up funding are finished, there would be stretch of more than 10 miles of double track, according to an FRA press release.
The grants were initially announced last year, but the funding was not released until now.
Caltrans public affairs officials were not available to provide comment on the timeline of the work or how much additional funding would be needed to complete the projects because of they remain in crisis mode after a Caltrans worker in San Diego had his arm cut off on Thursday.
FRA spokesman Mike England said more grants could be announced next week. He also said the FRA still had pots of money to tap into to fund rail and track construction.
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"Because several stretches of the rail corridor have only a single track, Amtrak and Metrolink trains must often grind to halt on their way in and out of San Diego while they wait for another train to pass."
Um, you mean NCTD/"Coaster" trains, not SCRRA/"Metrolink" trains, right? Coaster runs San Diego to Oceanside and Metrolink runs Ocenaside to LAUS.
This is great news.
Too often the headlines are dominated by headlines surrounding the expensive glamour of state-of-the-art High Speed Rail technology. And too often we forget that it is often more pragmatic to upgrade our more affordable traditional passenger rail routes. Significant improvements in speed and schedule performance can be gained by elimination of the bottlenecks with freight traffic. During periods of economic difficulty, these are the types of infrastructure projects that we should be pursuing. Although they are individually small in scope, they can add up very quickly in the widespread benefits that they produce. And that is often the wiser way to go than putting all our financial eggs into one expensively glamorous basket.