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From Freight to Passenger: Brett Weber's Rail Revolution

• Sherry

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Brett Weber joins us to discuss the effort to return passenger rail service to Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, connecting Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton to New York City. This initiative would revitalize a historic rail corridor while providing environmental benefits and economic opportunities for the region.

• All Aboard Lehigh Valley is working to reestablish passenger service along an existing freight rail corridor
• The route is part of Amtrak's "Connects US" plan and is considered one of the most valuable potential corridors in the country
• Passenger and freight trains can coexist through infrastructure improvements like additional tracks and longer sidings
• The project addresses environmental concerns by reducing car dependency and improving regional air quality
• Estimated cost of about $500 million represents a small portion of overall transportation spending
• Economic benefits include downtown revitalization and better connectivity to New York City
• The public can get involved through the Rail Passengers Association or by attending upcoming events
• A Lehigh Valley Rail Briefing is scheduled for March 20th at Lafayette College with key industry speakers

Join us at the Lehigh Valley Rail Briefing on Thursday, March 20th from 8am to 12pm at Williams Center for the Arts at Lafayette College. There's a networking breakfast from 7-8am, free parking, and free admission for students with valid ID. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit allaboardlehighvalley.org or search "Lehigh Valley Rail Briefing" on Eventbrite.


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Speaker 1:

Hi, my name is Sherry and welcome to my podcast, silver Tea. And this episode is about all aboard and we're going to talk to Brett Weber, who is working on a project that sounds so interesting a passenger train that's going to. They're trying to run through the Lehigh Valley, but I'm going to let Brett tell you more about that. So, brett, hi, thank you and welcome to my podcast.

Speaker 2:

Thanks, sherry.

Speaker 2:

So I am an architect that's my day job and I'm involved in a variety of nonprofit initiatives and I now live, I grew up, in the Delaware River Valley but I moved up to Easton, pennsylvania, up at the forks of the Delaware where the Lehigh comes in, and it's kind of a convergence with another role that I have where I serve as president of the Friends of the Delaware Canal.

Speaker 2:

It's where the Delaware Canal starts and runs from Easton all the way down to Bristol, but up at that point also the kind of headwaters of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution where the canal started. The rail historically was a really big thing, and so the Lehigh Valley Railroad, the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Central New Jersey Railroads connected New York, new Jersey, through Pennsylvania in the Lehigh Valley and then ultimately it became a really big steel hub and steel route because of Bethlehem Steel and all of the other production up there. The group that I've come to be associated with and that kind of reformed and restarted back in 2024 was All Aboard and we changed the name to All Aboard Lehigh Valley, and so the mission of our organization is to return passenger rail service to the Lehigh Valley, and this is an existing rail corridor that extends from right now from Allentown through Bethlehem, through Easton, through New Jersey, into New York, and so it's active as a freight corridor but it's historically was a really great connection of a passenger rail system.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so this is something that is a feature that you're projecting just to happen in the future with this passenger train, so can you tell us a little bit more about how it's going to impact, I guess, people that are traveling from there to New York and something?

Speaker 2:

there. Sure, it forms a part of what Amtrak is, the national train operator and Amtrak has the sort of national network of long distance routes. Amtrak has had this on their map of Amtrak connects US or connects the United States as a plan for through 2030 or 2050. And they have a national plan for all of this. And Allentown to New York city is one of the most valuable and potentially productive corridors in the country because there are lots of other longer distance.

Speaker 2:

This doesn't really qualify as a long distance route but Amtrak has has seen this as an important corridor because of the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton is referred to as the ABE metro area and the population growth over the next 25 years is well over 100,000 people, no-transcript, and it has different potential connections through New Jersey and requires the partnership of New Jersey Transit transit. But it gets us a train system that would run from Allentown to New York City and with some kind of a proposed daily operation. That makes it meaningful for commuting but also for all the other reasons why people travel Amtrak, which have changed a lot in the last 10 or 20 years. Not everybody is really using it as kind of a daily commute thing. It's more pleasure and lifestyle travel.

Speaker 1:

Oh, okay. So I know you talked about the freight train. Now how will this project address potential conflicts with the freight rail operations on the Sherrod track, the William track?

Speaker 2:

Sure, so right now it's exclusively freight and it's a very busy freight corridor. But there are lots of examples from around the country, one particularly in Virginia, where there was a significant partnership between Virginia Passenger Rail, the freight rail lines. The FRA, the Federal Railroad Administration, is the sort of key player in all of this and they basically provide a requirement for meeting the standards of, uh, what has to be done for accommodating freight, which means additional tracks, longer sidings to reach uh long, uh longer trains, um and so it's a planning and design process, but there's a lot of right-of-way and more than ample track dimension for us to be able to achieve that. That's something that happens or is fundamentally undertaken during detailed design. And just to give you a little background, while this is something that's been talked about a lot for the last 10 or 20 years, well, this is something that's been talked about a lot for the last 10 or 20 years.

Speaker 2:

In the last year, penndot so Pennsylvania Department of Transportation with WSP, which is an international engineering and design planning firm, wsp prepared a Lehigh Valley passenger rail study and it's the initial phase which looked at a lot of different options.

Speaker 2:

It looked at what does it mean if we connect to Reading. What does it mean if we connect to Philadelphia? What does it mean if we connect to New York? And I think from our purposes, from our perspective as a nonprofit and advocate group, we're looking at what's the sort of biggest prize, what is the biggest potential economic impact driver, and that's really connecting to New York, and the idea being also that Amtrak has a federal mandate and a prioritization of access to rail. So that means, like when Amtrak's on the rail system and in the routes, they have prioritization for throughput, which means their trains have to go through and freight has to wait, and it's also a command on the right ofway. So it gives Amtrak a priority which an independent rail organization wouldn't have. And there's precedent for that too, if you've ever ridden the train from, say, harrisburg out to Pittsburgh not many people do, but that ridership is growing and that's an important line which is heavy freight and passenger, and they've made accommodations to accommodate the freight.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so when you're talking about the right-of-ways, that sounds I work in engineering too and that sounds like that's a lot of work and you have to try to get all those right-of-ways in there.

Speaker 2:

I mean, what is the estimated cost of the project, including the construction and the annual expenses, I guess, to try to get the right-of-ways in there, well, so yeah, so one of the things that's interesting is that the freight lines are owned by the freight companies now, and so in some cases in different parts of the state, for example, amtrak owns the track, and in Virginia, the state rail authority reacquired right away and actual rail right. In the case of Pennsylvania rail in the Lehigh Valley, connecting through to New Jersey and to Penn Station in New York, we're dealing with track that's controlled by New Jersey Transit, so there's a partnership that would have to occur there. But the main thing is that the rail routes and the existing right-of-way. So for anybody who doesn't know what a right-of-way is, essentially that there is land that's owned, but there's an existing path for the rail.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

If it's not fully built out, there's an opportunity to build more, and so that's what's different than looking at other lines or connections, to say Philadelphia, where there might be a right-of-way but there's not even a track anymore. In some cases there are encumbrances or things that have been built into the right-of-way or challenge the development of that rail connection. So the New York connection is, it still will cost a significant amount of money to do the improvements to reach it. But the thing that we're really pursuing and it's one of the things that the briefing is going to address is some new data about cost and timeline, sort of updated, because Amtrak has been doing much more construction and management of these projects in the last five to 10 years, and most recently over the last five years. Really that we'll get to some of those answers.

Speaker 2:

But the main thing is that the economic impact of the projects is huge. So there's a significant multiplier for every dollar that's spent on infrastructure. There's a significant payback to the economy, and so those models will be completed. But we're talking about a rail corridor that existed historically in the early 20th century that connected all of these cities and they had stations, they had connections. People understood and still recall that service. There are many people still living that recall the service and can see that happening again. So it's not like building a railroad in a new landscape.

Speaker 1:

You talk about landscape, so what environment considerations needed to be addressed during the construction and operation of this whole project?

Speaker 2:

Anything that exists on the books is something that has to be addressed. I think that, again, in this case it's not a question of new rail where there isn't rail. So a lot of the environmental issues and other issues for communities are going to be where does the development happen around the corridor? Because the rail exists, so where there's. You know, right now the freight lines run right through the middle of phillipsburg in new jersey, right through easton, right through bethlehem and allentown. It's. It's really going to be a focus, I think, mostly on what are the impacts for, uh, train station development and development that's related to that. Each municipality will need to look at the impacts and where they guide development so that it's a really positive and smart thing. And in the rail corridors there are all sorts of safety considerations to be concerned about crossings and that sort of stuff. So I think those are the biggest thing.

Speaker 2:

On the environmental front, the big news is really that passenger rail solves a lot of the environmental problems that are pressing the Lehigh Valley. If you Google air quality in the Lehigh Valley, you'll see how many days it sort of exceeds federal standards, whatever standards we have remaining of air quality monitoring. We need to get cars off the road. We need to reduce the sort of dependence on vehicular transportation and one of the things that we're looking at in Lehigh Valley is that there's the opportunity to connect the rail directly to an international airport, so the ABE, allentown, bethlehem Eastern Area Airport. There's a rail line there. There's the potential of connecting that directly. Those things start to really significantly reduce rel and we're using that longer distance train with Amtrak going to New York City to also do inner city traffic, which we were talking about earlier you know getting being able to hop on a train and sort of use it like the old electric trolley lines that used to exist between the cities.

Speaker 2:

Those were the old interurbans. But you have this, you know service that is not a transit system that provides the equivalent of that. You know sort of a higher level of quality in an Amtrak service, you know.

Speaker 1:

So I mean. So. For me that sounds like how would you offset this cost? How will it impact the community? Will like what would be the affordability for all residents? Will it be too expensive? Would I want to get in my car? Would I want to get on this train? Because I can't afford to? So it's.

Speaker 2:

You know, pricing structure is one of the things that Amtrak, as an operator, would need to tailor to make it make sense for, say, inner city travel.

Speaker 2:

But because all of these lines are state-sponsored rail lines, because all of these lines are state-sponsored rail lines, so there's a level of federal funding that sort of takes care of the initial potentially, at least in the existing system there's sort of a kind of initial development period, and the state-sponsored rail means that there's a contribution from the state, government and state revenues to ensure that the rail service operates.

Speaker 2:

And so part of that funding equation impacts how, or could impact, the rate structure. To say, we want rates to be more meaningfully affordable between the cities, let's say in Pennsylvania, so we're only hitting three cities, and that you know it's not necessarily like a third of the fare to New York City, you know. So there could be some accommodation there. But, as I mentioned before, you have to figure out what's the cost of an Uber, let's say, or a rideshare costs from Allentown to Bethlehem or to Easton, and if you can get a fare that's less than that, it becomes really attractive. And it's different too, because it's supposed to be about encouraging people to be able to be in those downtown areas and walk to a station and get on the train and walk off the train and be where they want to be.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so for the community. I mean, what type of community involvement do you have? Like? Could they contribute or support this project?

Speaker 2:

Sure, so one of the things that I do is I serve as a member of the Rail Passengers Association, which is a roughly 50,000-member strong organization that advocates for passenger rail. So that's a national initiative, but it's open to the public to become a member, and it's part of like any other advocacy group, you get involved and you have an opportunity to get more direct feedback on what's happening in Washington, what's happening at the state level, and, if you're really interested that's one of the best ways to stay engaged with what's going on will have a membership status shortly, because we just received an approval for our nonprofit fiscal sponsorship through HSI, which is based in Bethlehem. They're a nonprofit fiscal sponsor, so they allow us to act like a nonprofit and do all the things a nonprofit can do to raise money and to support our advocacy until we achieve our own nonprofit status, so that'll be coming up shortly. One of the best things to do, though, is we'll be coming to this, which is the Lehigh Valley Rail Briefing, which is coming up this Thursday at Lafayette College, and it's a public forum, but, importantly, it's got a lot of key people from the rail industry, so we have representatives from Meredith Richards, who's our chair from Rail Passengers Association. She's going to be talking about Virginia as a really great case study and precedent for what Pennsylvania could do. Importantly because they develop their own rail authority to help really guide more of the responsibility of developing rail across the state for passenger rail. Jim Matthews, who's the president and CEO of Rail Passengers, he's going to be talking about sort of national trends and national examples.

Speaker 2:

Importantly, probably the keynote speaker for us is really Joseph Barr, who's director of planning for Network East and Amtrak and he hasn't really done a public engagement piece. This is more of a briefing, it's not a workshop. But we also have Brian Licari, who's vice president at eConsult Solutions, and they're economic impact consultants that do assessments and do reports and they've done a lot of stuff in the Philadelphia area and nationally, have a lot of international expertise. And we have a fellow coming from David Peter Allen, who's a contributing editor for Railway Age and so he's talking about. He's ridden a million miles of rail around the country and can talk about the importance of Amtrak and as a service really to the country and as a service to connect people.

Speaker 2:

To answer your question about public engagement, the Delaware Valley Planning Commission and Delaware Valley Transportation Study the study is the project of the Planning Commission and the DVPC is the MPO, so they are the regional planning authority and they provide and are funded to provide and and structure the public engagement for review, and so there was a public review and comment period and engagement workshops for the initial passenger rail study and there'll be another one as it comes forward. So we're looking forward to working with them. They're the official planning agency, if you will, and the cities will also have their own planning departments and planning agencies have public input about what's happening in their respective cities. But that stuff will happen as the plan goes forward. The key thing is really for us to all together, as a community, determine that that's the route that wants to be pursued, and that may be something that has to come out of a phase two study or it is determined by legislators and the commission as something to pursue.

Speaker 1:

And so what's the feedback so far from the community? I mean, what you getting back from that?

Speaker 2:

So it's interesting. I mean, I think that there's a lot of fatigue, quite frankly, about having talked about this for 10 or 20 years. Yeah, and what's interesting, though, in terms of the last administration's significant multi-billion dollar investment in rail nationally on the federal level, that really was a shot in the arm for Amtrak. And so there are new cars and new services that people are going to experience around the country, and that's really key, I think, for Americans to actually experience a really great rail experience and then understand that it's achievable. In terms of our direct response. I think there's a lot of enthusiasm about stuff coming back to life, and sometimes it just takes a new person to come into the conversation with a new observation. I grew up in Pennsylvania, I wasn't born in the Lehigh Valley, but I'm a resident there now and I've I'm happy to be there and really excited to be there and want to be a part of helping to move this, this forward with a can do attitude, and I think that it's really a question of what do we want to do, and it's, you know, amtrak is a service. It's treated as a business, but it's really a service.

Speaker 2:

Penndot agencies like PennDOT have enormous budgets in the billions of dollars. I think the current budget request is around $12 billion, more potentially with additional federal funds. When you're looking at maybe a $500 million expenditure to do a lot of the capital improvements, it's sort of a drop in the bucket in the kind of overall transportation landscape. So right now we're looking at really having counties and cities and perhaps the state kick in the funds to fund something that's roughly between $400,000 and $500,000 as a phase two study to commit to the corridor that we want to pursue and then, once that's done, then you need to get into the really detailed planning of what does that corridor really cost.

Speaker 2:

Again, some of it will be related to us in this briefing by Amtrak, as here's what the updated numbers are. Here's what the updated look is. Not too long ago, amtrak and others were projecting that you could have something in a three to five year kind of timeframe. It depends if the focus is really on the New York route, that may be a possibility. Others will look to a 10 to 20 year timeline, but that's the nature of these things. But it's really. The point is that there has to be a decision now for us to move forward and for that to be a reality.

Speaker 1:

So, brett, I want to thank you for coming on the show, and can you tell us one more time when this briefing is going to be?

Speaker 2:

Yes, yes, and so it's Thursday, March 20th. It's from 8 am to 12 noon. There's a networking breakfast 7 to 8. It's Williams Center for the Arts at Lafayette College, 317 Hamilton Street in Easton. There's free parking and if you're a student with a valid ID, it's free. Also, I want to mention that we are planning a full Lehigh Valley summit, a rail summit, in October of this year, also at Lafayette College. So save the date. It'll be an important opportunity and we can do another conversation about that, and we're also hoping to launch a series of workshops between now and then that will be held in Easton, Bethlehem and Allentown, so that we're actually reaching out to all of those communities.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so where can they find this information? Can we post that?

Speaker 2:

Best question. So that is allaboardlehighvalleyorg. And our event is. You can purchase tickets from that website. You can also search on Eventbrite for Lehigh Valley Rail Briefing and you'll find it there.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, brett, for coming and giving us the information. I mean it was very, very insightful and informational. If you're looking for the information, you know where to go. Go to all aboard lehighvalleyorg and go check out the information and get involved.

Speaker 2:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Thank you. So my listeners and my viewers, you know to always say early detection is the best protection. So get your annual mammograms done. If you haven't gotten it done, what are you waiting for? If you got it done, put it on your calendar for next year and until then, I'll see you on the next episode.