Amtrak
Amtrak Vice President, State Supported Services Ray Lang on Sept. 13 joined WITF’s The Spark to discuss the progress being made on the Harrisburg Line Track Renewal Project.
Amtrak in partnership with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is investing $122 million to improve the Harrisburg Line between Lancaster and Harrisburg, through the replacement of 43 track-miles of rail (nearly 100% of the rail in this territory); installation of 113,000 concrete ties; and cleaning and refreshing of 226,500 feet of ballast. The state-of-good-repair project, which affects Keystone Service, began March 15 and is being expedited with a combination of single- and full-track outages during the day, which improves work efficiencies and reduces the duration of rider impacts, according to Amtrak.
“It’s a very innovative project the way that we’re doing the work,” Lang told WITF’s Asia Tabb, “because historically you tend to tend to do this kind of track replacement projects at night, during the evening … We’re doing this largely during daylight hours and primarily because the topography of the land there is very hilly, very narrow in some places, and right-of-way is very narrow … But what we have really done is we shut down one of the two tracks on that line during the daytime and are doing that work and limiting the number of trains that go through there while the employees are actually on the railroad re-laying ties and ballast. And that has meant that we’ve had to truncate some of the services so that not all of the trains during the daylight hours go between Philly, Lancaster and Harrisburg. Most of them are largely the midday trains, are largely Philadelphia just to Lancaster with bus bridges providing a link between the Lancaster Station and Harrisburg.”
According to Lang, having the work take place during the day rather than at night has meant the project will wrap up in nearly half the original estimated timeline of two years. Amtrak, he said, will try to replicate the approach elsewhere in the future.
During the podcast episode, Lang also highlighted Amtrak’s infrastructure investments under way around the country, including the the start of delivery in late 2025 of the Airo trainsets from Siemens Mobility, which will also be deployed in Keystone Service; recovery post-pandemic, including record ridership trends; and other updates.
The episode is available on The Spark website, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
SMART
SMART will use a $7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Safe Streets and Roads for All program to fund the completion of the SMART Pathway segment between Santa Rosa, Calif., and the Sonoma County Airport (see map above). This segment will close a 4.73-mile gap in the 21-mile SMART Pathway, which the commuter railroad calls a “multi-use facility that enhances mobility for bicyclists and pedestrians” and connects communities from the Town of Windsor to the City of Petaluma.
The SMART Pathway is the southern portion of the Great Redwood Trail, which provides first- and last-mile connections to SMART commuter rail stations and offers a safe way to travel along the rail corridor, particularly in areas where the SMART Pathway is the shortest path of travel between communities, according to the railroad, whose 45-mile system includes stations in the Sonoma County Airport area, Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park, Cotati, Petaluma, Novato, San Rafael, and Larkspur.
Over the past year, more than 784,200 pedestrian and bicycle trips were completed utilizing the pathway to access the train, for recreation, commuting to work and school, and for trip purposes of all types, according to SMART.
“SMART is working hard to implement our voters’ vision of a complete rail and pathway network,” SMART Board member and Sonoma County Supervisor Chris Coursey said. “This new segment will greatly benefit the residents and businesses of Marin and Sonoma counties, making it more accessible to commute and travel for recreation by bicycle and train. It’s exactly this kind of improvement to the corridor our voters envisioned and that SMART is working to deliver.”
