• Improved Bike/Ped bridge for the Ohio River!

• Freight Rail Improvents in Appalachia!

Everyone's favorite stimulus program, the TIGER grants, have been released today. The grant process was very competitive, with $60 billion of requests for a scant $1.5 billion of funding. The great thing about TIGER is that the money is not pidgeon holed for a single mode of travel (e.g. roads), but rather competitive based on benefit/cost analysis across all modes. So you see freight rail projects competing with highway projects competing with sidewalk improvement projects.

Update: No, its not the Big 4 ... added fresh info on the Big 4 below the fold...

Climb abord the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway as PBS's ongoing series "Blueprint America" examines the big problem in American freight rail right now: the massive bottleneck in Chicago.

Rick Karr reports that though highways and aircraft have both subsidies and a massive federal program overseeing them, the most effecient method of bulk good movement has virtually no federal-level planning or funding. He further profiles attempts to work on public-private partnerships to get the rail companies to help themselves.

There's also some interesting footage from inside the engine of a train, where Engineer Dino McCullough and Conductor Darius Dooley struggle to get their load through Chicago's huge, antiquated network of rail connections. Think about the last time you saw footage from inside a big freight rail outfit's engine.

Links: video ... written transcript

TARC is working on raising money to study the P&L / 31W corridor. Three alternatives will be examined:

1. Beefed up express TARC bus service along 31W
2. Commuter service via motor coach
3. Commuter Rail on the P&L tracks

In other words CART, Metro Council, PAL, Miller, TARC, and the cities and counties have gotten this ball rolling.

So how do you get goods to market with zero oil? Right now, you don't. In the future though, it could be done even in the US, if we use this plan for electrifying our national railroad system.

The system is elegant in its construction plan. In the great plains there isn't a lot of electricity to support electrified rail, but there are huge rights of way already ceded to the railroad companies, and they can ship out giant cranes along the rail, and use it to erect massive windmills to power the freight. With the savings in truck traffic on our highway, and thus road wear, we may find that this project pays for itself.

The Oil Drum: Multiple Birds – One Silver BB: A synergistic set of solutions to multiple issues focused on Electrified Railroads

"Global Trade, Fuel Costs Add Up To Expansion for Once-Dying Industry"

The Washington Post scores again with this summary of the boom in the RR industry:

The freight railway industry is enjoying its biggest building boom in nearly a century, a turnaround as abrupt as it is ambitious. It is largely fueled by growing global trade and rising fuel costs for 18-wheelers. In 2002, the major railroads laid off 4,700 workers; in 2006, they hired more than 5,000.