By Andrew Adams
A trip from St. Louis to Chicago through Amtrak’s Lincoln Service became 15 minutes quicker starting last week due to track upgrades that allow for increased speeds.
The Amtrak line ran its first 110 miles per hour service Monday, June 26 an increase from 90 miles per hour previously, which makes the one-way trip less than five hours. The trip recently 30 minutes quicker than when the service ran at 79 miles per hour at the project’s outset in 2010.
The faster speed of 110 doesn’t meet the federal definition of high-speed rail, 125 miles per hour, however, the new Lincoln Service is faster than most other Amtrak trains. Less than half of Amtrak trains pass 100 miles per hour, according to a March Amtrak report.
The speed upgrade is part of a broader $1.96 billion infrastructure project aimed at upgrading passenger rail service in Illinois. The funds mostly came from the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a 2009 stimulus package passed in response to the Great Recession. Approximately $300 million in funding for the project came from a mix of State and non-Federal sources, according to the State’s governor’s office.
Ray Lang, Amtrak’s vice president of State-supported services, said he thinks the upgrades to route speed will help the Company make rail travel more appealing Downstate.
“We really think that now we’ll really begin to penetrate that market in a meaningful way south of Springfield and really begin to compete with the aviation industry between St. Louis and Chicago,” Lang said.
In fiscal year 2022, the Lincoln Service route had a ridership of 476,000, up 82% from 261,000 the previous year, which included several months in late 2020 and 2021 when the COVID-19 pandemic was still disrupting daily travel. Despite the growth, ridership has yet to surpass pre-pandemic levels. In FY 2019, the route took approximately 628,000 trips, according to Amtrak data.
Local, State and Federal officials celebrated the infrastructure investment at Chicago’s Union Station last week. Governor JB Pritzker, Cook County Board president, Toni Preckwinkle, U.S. senator Dick Durbin ,and former U.S. secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, were on hand for the news conference, with others from the State congressional delegation, representatives of federal transit agencies, and Union Pacific Railroad.
“Our railway is just a microcosm of the monumental collaboration of the federal government, the State of Illinois and local governments to modernize our infrastructure,” Pritzker said.
In addition to the higher speed service, the infrastructure project included major upgrades at rail crossings, and new stations in Dwight, Pontiac, Carlinville, and Alton, as well as upgrades to the Lincoln, Normal, and Springfield, stations.
Rail passengers will see new railcars on the Lincoln Service route and several other routes throughout the Midwest, including the Chicago-to-Carbondale Illini/Saluki route and the Chicago-to-Quincy Carl Sandburg/Illinois Zephyr route.
The upgraded passenger cars will be rolled out by the end of August, with updated cafe cars set for 2024, according to Jennifer Bastian, the Illinois Department of Transportation official who managed the passenger car project.
The new cars, which cost approximately $3 million each, are engineered to minimize noise and increase accessibility. These include measures to increase compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), such as wider and more stable walkways between cars, wheelchair lifts, and seat designs to facilitate easier wheelchair transfers.
The U.S. Department of Justice and Amtrak signed a settlement agreement in 2020 to upgrade stations throughout the country to comply with the ADA.
According to Amtrak’s most recent report on ADA compliance from April 2022, the rail service had completed 373 station construction and design projects, with 167 in progress and 364 remaining. Amtrak is updating passenger display boards and boarding technology as part of its ADA settlement agreement with the federal Department of Justice in 2020. Amtrak is updating passenger display boards and boarding technology as part of the ADA settlement agreement.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering State government. It is distributed to hundreds of print and broadcast outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, along with major contributions from the Illinois Broadcasters Foundation and Southern Illinois Editorial Association.
— Capitol News Illinois