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Amtrak’s route from Chicago to St. Louis would seem an ideal place for the U.S. to adopt high-speed rail such as in Europe and Asia, where passenger trains can race along at 200 miles an hour. The stretch in Illinois is a straight shot across mostly flat terrain.
In fact, a fast-rail project is under way in Illinois. Yet the trains will top out at 110 mph., shaving just an hour from what is now a 5½-hour train trip.
After it’s finished, at a cost of about $2 billion, the state figures the share of people who travel between the two cities by rail could rise just a few percentage points.
Behind such modest gains, for hundreds of millions of dollars spent, lie some of the reasons high-speed train travel remains an elusive goal in the U.S.
The challenges faced by Illinois, among them limited federal funding and people’s ingrained travel habits, mirror those faced by other states that would like to upgrade the passenger rail network.
The issue is drawing renewed attention as part of congressional Democrats’ “Green New Deal” to overhaul the country’s energy and transportation infrastructure. Some local governments are looking at ways to commit to reducing their carbon footprint, or to better serve an aging and urbanizing population.
Yet just last month, California’s governor sharply scaled back a costly high-speed-rail project the state has been working on for years, shelving plans to provide fast passenger trains between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Illinois didn’t have the money, or the right-of-way, to lay tracks that would be exclusively for a high-speed service. So its fast passenger trains will have to share the track with lumbering freight trains.
“To build the kind of infrastructure that is stand-alone—that is, just for high-speed passenger rail—it is just absurdly expensive and just takes years and years and years to get through the permitting and environmental process,” said Randy Blankenhorn, who was Illinois’s transportation secretary until this year.
“Land acquisition alone [would] take half a decade,” he said. “If we were to have said from the beginning, right off the bat go to 200-mile-an-hour service, we’d still be in the implementing and design phase.”
Illinois settled for weaving improvements along the route and rebuilding an existing single-track line that is owned by freight railroads. In effect, it chose higher-speed rail rather than actual high-speed.
The targeted 110 mph speed is well above the top of 79 mph on Amtrak’s current Chicago-St. Louis Lincoln Service, yet far slower than the fastest trains abroad or even than Amtrak trains between Washington and Boston, which can reach 150 mph. In a first phase, passenger trains south of Springfield, Ill., should reach 90 mph. this spring or early summer, the Illinois Department of Transportation said. It hopes the top speed of 110 mph can be achieved not long after.
California has been taking the opposite approach from Illinois’s—building a passenger rail service with dedicated track. But the price tag for its long-running project rose to an estimated $77 billion. Gov. Gavin Newsom said in mid-February the ambitious plan would cost too much and take too long, adding: “There simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA.”
Mr. Newsom said work would continue on a shorter stretch of high-speed rail over dedicated track between Merced and Bakersfield. New doubts arose a week later, however, when the Trump administration said that it intended to cancel more than $900 million of planned future funding for the California rail project, and that it was exploring legal options to recover $2.5 billion of federal money already spent on it. Mr. Newsom said California would fight to keep the funds.