Delaware study examines north-south passenger rail

February 14, 2001 Transportation authorities in Delaware and Maryland soon will begin studying the possibility of a new passenger rail line that would run north and south through the First State, The News Journal reports.

The $900,000 study will
examine the feasibility of rail service from New Castle County south to Dover
and further on to Ocean City, Md. It’s part of a national program to examine
high-speed inter-city rail service under the federal stimulus act.

But commuters shouldn’t get
their hopes up too much — it will take two years to finish the study, and then
another untold number of years to actually build the line should it be deemed
practical, cautioned Mike Williams of the Delaware Department of
Transportation.

"It’s just in its
infancy," Williams said. "Building rail, similar to building new road
infrastructure, is a complex, long-term and pricey proposition."

Still, rail enthusiasts are
welcoming those baby steps. Tom Posatko, president of the Delmarva Rail
Passenger Association, said Maryland and Delaware have been "somewhat slow
in coming to a realization that there’s more to transportation than
highways." He called word of the study encouraging, as it could lead to a
serious look at expanding passenger rail service in the region.

"We’ve been out there
saying this, and it’s slowly catching on," Posatko said.

Any passenger rail service
considered as part of the study would be run on brand-new tracks, not existing
freight lines, because of the restrictions that would be imposed by the freight
companies, Williams said. "The mingling and mixing of freight service and
passenger rail service doesn’t work," he said.

The study will be financed
mostly by the federal government and Delaware — including $450,000 in federal
funds, $400,000 from Delaware and $45,000 from Maryland, Williams said.

Maryland’s part of the
study is smaller and will look at extending the scope of rail service from the
Delaware line into Ocean City, said Erin Henson of the Maryland Department of
Transportation. She said Maryland decided to "piggyback" on the
Delaware study after being approached by First State officials.

"The potential is that
this alternate rail option could reduce traffic on the Bay Bridge and
Maryland’s Eastern Shore highways," Henson said.

The study will focus on
estimating the demand for passenger rail in the region, determining what would
be a sufficient volume of passengers to warrant moving ahead with the next
steps of permitting, land purchasing and construction, Williams said. If
approved, that process could take decades to work through.

He cautioned that the
threshold for gauging that demand is high. "A few hundred or a few
thousand people saying, ‘Trains are a great idea’ does not equal sufficient
demand for construction," Williams said.

Posatko said the issue of
demand is critical: "If we go and put in a rail line, then we’ve got to be
sure that it’s something that people want and it’s something that people are
going to use."

But he said other areas
around the country that have taken the plunge and developed passenger rail
systems have found that they work well and are popular.

"It’s sort of like the
old ‘Field of Dreams’ line — ‘If you build it, they will use it,’"
Posatko said. "Sometimes it’s hard to know in advance whether people are
going to — they may not commit to it, but once they see it in place and once
they realize this is a whole lot better than driving up Route 1 or whatever,
they will come."