St. Louis-Chicago high-speed rail gets $1.1B in stimulus
By Cara | January 28, 2010
via St. Louis Business Journal:
A White House official plans to visit St. Louis today to announce $1.1 billion in stimulus money for high-speed rail between St. Louis and Chicago and another $31 million to upgrade passenger rail service between St. Louis and Kansas City.
Ed Montgomery, executive director of the White House Council on Automotive Communities and Workers, plans to make the announcement at 12:30 pm. at the St. Louis Gateway Multimodal Transportation Center in downtown St. Louis.
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon and U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-Mo., also plan to attend the news conference.
President Obama highlighted high-speed rail in his State of the Union address Wednesday night.
The local funding is part of the $8 billion in stimulus funding the White House is doling out Thursday for 13 new, large-scale high-speed rail corridors across the country. More than $55 billion in applications were submitted for the $8 billion available to be awarded through the federal Recovery Act.
The Obama administration likened its vision for high-speed rail to that of President Eisenhower, the “father of the Interstate highway system.”
But building a comprehensive high-speed rail network does not happen overnight, White House officials said. Spain spent two decades and $35 billion developing its high-speed rail system. South Korea took 12 years and more than $10 billion to build a line stretching from Seoul to Busan, which is comparable to the distance between Boston and New York.
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