Not A Train, A Spine | Indiana Century S1E6

The interstate highway system was a marvel. It moved goods faster than ever. It connected cities. It made America an economic powerhouse.

It also bypassed every small town it touched.

Main streets emptied. Downtowns hollowed out. The places where people used to run into each other couldn't compete with exit ramps. We optimized for moving things. We forgot about connecting people.

This episode is about building something different. High speed rail, but not as transportation. As infrastructure. As the spine that holds the body together.

The Innovation Triangle connects Indianapolis, Lafayette, and Kokomo in thirty minutes or less. Not someday. Now. Electric trains powered by our own SMRs. Stations that become new Main Streets. Fiber running alongside, connecting every Hoosier. Health hubs co located where the trains stop.

We talk about how it gets built. The technology. The route. The funding. The constitutional amendment that protects property owners while making it possible. And why this isn't about getting from one place to another faster. It's about turning a region into a neighborhood.

Featured book: The Master Switch by Tim Wu. About who holds the switch, and how we can make sure no one ever does.

IndianaCentury.org

Transcript

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Episode 6. Not a train, a spine. Part 1. What we lost when we paved paradise. About 10 years ago, I discovered a list of the most haunted places in Indiana. Most of them were locations in the middle of nowhere. My wife and I took a weekend to drive around the state and visit each one. This provided us with an excellent opportunity to visit and experience Indiana's small towns off the beaten path. Take a drive through almost any Indiana small town. Not the ones off the interstate exits with the gas stations and fast food. The ones just far enough off the highway that you have to slow down and actually go through them. You'll see a street named Railroad or Depot, sometimes both. And if you look close, you'll see what's missing. Maybe there's an old brick building with a label sign Union Depot established 1892. Maybe just a lot full of weeds where the tracks used to run. Maybe nothing at all. A hundred years ago, those streets were the center of everything. The train came through town two, three, four times a day, brought people, brought goods, brought mail from cousins in Chicago, fabric from New York, news from the outside world. The depot was where you met people. Where you greeted soldiers coming home, where you said goodbye to daughters moving to the city for work. It was a place. A real place. Then we paved paradise and put up a parking lot. I'm quoting Joni Mitchell, but I mean it literally. The interstate highway system was a marvel and still is. It moved goods faster than ever, it connected cities, it made America the economic powerhouse it became, but it also bypassed every small town that it touched. Think about what happened. Before the interstate, if you were going from Indianapolis to Chicago, you drove right through Lebanon, through Frankfurt, through Lafayette. You stopped for gas, maybe grabbed lunch. You were in those towns. After I-65 opened, you went around them, or past them. Exit ramps became the new main streets, but they're not really main streets. They're strips. Gas, food, a hotel if you're tired. Nothing you'd linger in by choice. Nothing you'd call a place. Main streets hollowed out, downtowns emptied, the places where people used to run into each other, the depot, the diner, the hardware store. They couldn't compete with the exit ramp. Not because they weren't good, because the traffic stopped coming. We optimized for moving things. We forgot about connecting people. Here's what I learned in my thousands of conversations across all 92 counties. People aren't just lonely for company. They're lonely for place. For the feeling of being somewhere that matters, somewhere connected to something bigger than their driveway and their TV. That's not sentimental, that's infrastructure. So here's my question for this episode. What if we could have both? What if we could move goods and connect people? What if the next generation of infrastructure didn't just pass through our towns, it actually stopped in them? What if we built something that did for the 21st century Indiana what the railroads did for the 19th century America? That's what we're talking about today. Not a train, a spine. Part 2. The Crossroads Trap Revisited. In Episode 2, I laid out what I called the Crossroads Trap. Let me revisit it real quick because it's the foundation for everything we're building in this episode today. Indiana calls itself the Crossroads of America. Sounds good, right? Central, the central, heart of the country. But a crossroads is where things pass through on their way to somewhere else. The trucks rumbling down I-65, where's the cargo going? Chicago, Detroit, not to us. The trains rolling through Lafayette. Who owns those rails? CSX, Norfolk Southern. They are based in Florida and Virginia. The goods are headed to East Coast ports. We're the highway, not the destination. Look at the numbers. Indiana moves more tonnage per capita than almost any other state. Number one in cross country truck traffic. Our rail network is among the busiest in the nation. And what do we get for it? Worn out roads, congestion, diesel exhaust in communities along the interstates, a few logistics jobs at warehouses that could be anywhere, and that pay like it too. That's the trap. We built our identity around being the place things passed through. We built our economy around it. And we got the wear and tear while someone else got the value. Now I'm not saying the interstate was a mistake, it definitely wasn't, but it was built for a different era for different problems. The problem then was moving goods fast, at scale, coast to coast. The interstate solved that. The problem now is different. The problem now is that we've optimized movement so much that we've disconnected ourselves. We built a system that's great for trucks and terrible for towns, great for logistics companies, and terrible for main streets. So what does it look like when we build infrastructure for ourselves? Not for pass-through, but for place. Part three. Imagine three cities, one loop, thirty minutes between any two. Indianapolis, State Capitol, Economic Engine, Medical Hub, the largest city in the state where jobs and opportunities concentrate. Lafayette and West Lafayette, Purdue University, Engineering, Research, Agriculture, and soon, if we build it, the heart of our energy economy, small modular reactor, number one, right there on Purdue's campus. Next is Kokomo and Grissom, manufacturing backbone of the state, defense industry, advanced materials, and the future home of the Indiana Sentry Corps boot camp. That's the innovation triangle, those three points, connected not by a highway that bypasses everything between them, but by a rail line that serves everything between them. Now, here's what I mean by high speed rail. It's not the Amtrak trains that crawl through at 30 miles an hour, stopping whenever a freight train needs the track. We're talking about rail rail, dedicated track, electrified, double tracked the whole way, 200 miles per hour. What does that mean for travel times? Well today, Indianapolis to Lafayette is an hour and fifteen minutes by car, and that's if there's no heavy traffic. By high speed rail, thirty minutes. Indianapolis to Kokomo today is about an hour. By rail, it would also be about thirty minutes. And Lafayette to Kokomo today is about fifty minutes. By rail, twenty minutes. Think about what this does to a region. It turns three separate metro areas into one connected neighborhood. Live in Kokomo, work in Indy, home for dinner, any day of the week. Student at Purdue, internship at a downtown Indy firm, back for class in the morning. Not during the summer, just a regular semester trip to the city. Grandparents in rural Clinton County, grandkids in the city, see them on a Wednesday night, help with homework, be present. Specialists at a Lafayette hospital could consult at an indie hospital and be back before lunch. Share their expertise, cover more patients, save more lives. This is where I need you to picture something. Every station on this line isn't just a platform with a ticket machine. It's a new main street. Think about Lebanon, Frankfurt, Tipton, towns that lost their downtowns when the interstate went in. Towns with beautiful old buildings and empty storefronts. A high speed rail station changes the math. Suddenly, you're not a bypassed town, you're a connected town. Thirty minutes from Indy, twenty minutes from Lafayette. People can live there and work in the city. Companies can locate there and access the whole region. So you build around the station. Apartments above, shops below, walkable, pedestrian friendly, a place where people actually are, not just pass through. Local electric buses connect to the surrounding county. Bike parking, sidewalks that lead somewhere, and because we're integrating everything, this is the Indiana Century, not just a collection of random projects. That station also hosts a health hub. You could have a clinic upstairs, a pharmacy downstairs, an Indiana Century Corps, resilience corps members, doing community health work out of the same buildings. That is the spine metaphor. A spine does two things. It supports the body and it connects the brain to the limbs. That's what high speed rail does for Indiana. It's not just transportation, it's a central nervous system for the state. Without a spine, you've just got a pile of bones. With a spine, you've got a body that can stand up, move, reach, grasp, do. We've been a pile of bones for long enough, it's time to build the spine. Part four. How we build it. So how do we actually build this thing? First, the technology. We're not reinventing the wheel here. Steel wheel on steel rail is proven. France has been running TGV since 1981. Japan's Shinkansen since 1964. Spain, Germany, Italy, China, they all have it. It works. We're using the same basic principle, dedicated tracks, electrified, grade separated, meaning no at grade crossings where a train meets the road using advanced signaling that lets trains run close together safely. Why electric? Two reasons. First, because we're going to generate that electricity ourselves. Pillar one, our small modular reactors power our trains. Closed loop. Second, because electric trains are quieter, smoother, faster acceleration, and lower operating costs over time. And zero direct emissions. Which matters when you're running through towns. Now, the hard part. Right of way. Building new rail corridors means acquiring land. That's the part that stops a lot of projects before they even start. But we've got advantages. First, existing rail corridors. Some are abandoned, some are underutilized. Indiana has miles of track that once carried passengers and now carry nothing. We can use those corridors, not take them from freight railroads, but partner where it makes sense, build alongside where it doesn't. Second, highway medians. I-65 has wide medians and many stretches. The US 31 corridor has room. We can co-locate with existing infrastructure instead of carving new paths through farmland. Third, state owned land. Indiana owns a lot of property. We can just simply use it. Fourth, and this one is important, constitutional reform. Our proposed amendment one is the infrastructure corridors amendment. It does two things. It creates a clear process for designating critical infrastructure corridors, and it guarantees fair treatment for property owners, fair market value, relocation assistance, community benefit agreements. No one loses their home without full compensation and a better option. Here's the proposed alignment for the innovation triangle. Start in Indianapolis, either downtown or near the airport. We'll study both. Head northwest towards Zionsville, then follow the I-65 corridor toward Lebanon. Put a station in Lebanon. This is a town that could be transformed by a high speed rail station. Continue to Lafayette. Station near Purdue station downtown Lafayette, then east towards Frankfurt. Station in Frankfurt, then northeast to Cocomo. Station in downtown Kokomo and a station at Grissom connecting to the ICC boot camp and to defense manufacturing. Then south towards Noblesville and Fisher's. Station at the Noblesville Corridor and right there, co-located, the future Indiana Nuclear Fuel Campus. Secure transport of fuel materials by rail, not by truck. That way we can keep fuel off of our roads. Then back to Indianapolis. That's the loop. 150 miles connected. And here's the thing about building it. We do it in phases. Phase one, Indianapolis up to Lafayette. Get that working, prove the model. Then Indianapolis to Kokomo. Then simply complete the loop. After that, we expand. South Bend, Chicago, Evansville, Louisville, Fort Wayne. Eventually, every major city in Indiana connected. But start where the density is, where the ridership will be, where the economic impact is most immediate. Build what works, prove it, and then scale. Part five. Now here is something most conversations about high speed rail miss. Passenger trains will run during the day. That's when most people travel. But at night, those tracks are quiet. But we don't let them stay quiet. High speed freight. Dedicated overnight slots for goods that need to move fast. Think about what that enables. We could ship hemp materials fresh from a processor in Kokomo to the furniture manufacturer in Indy next morning. They're building with it. Not waiting three days for a truckload. Pharmaceuticals, cold chain, time sensitive, from a Lafayette lab to an indie hospital overnight, not sitting on a loading dock, not sitting in a truck. Advanced manufacturing components, just in time delivery for factories. The part you need shows up at 5 a.m. and then we'll go into the machine by 7. Fresh food, farm to market overnight, Indiana grown produce in Indiana kitchens the next day all over the state. And nuclear fuel for the future. Secure scheduled transport to our energy parks, not on trucks that go through your town. On rail, monitored, and protected. So why does this matter? Because Indiana is already a logistics hub. We've got the warehouses, the distribution centers, the trucking companies, high speed freight gives us a premium product to sell. Guaranteed delivery windows, not sometime Thursday. We could say by 6 a.m. Temperature controlled options for sensitive goods, security for high value cargo, lower carbon footprint than trucks, less wear on our roads, and because the trains are electric, we can power them with our own reactors. The operating costs are stable, no diesel price spikes, no market volatility. Integration with agriculture, pillar three, is huge here. Hemp processed in Kokomo, shipped overnight to manufacturers, grain from Lafayette to Evansville for export, Indiana premium products, the certified stuff from the Hoosier Heritage Land Trust, to Chicago by morning, commanding premium prices, the farmers win, the processors win, the manufacturers win, and the track pays for itself. Part six The Light Beam. For every mile of rail we lay, we string fiber optics. Same trench, same right-of-way, same construction crew, one pass, two assets. Now, why does state-owned fiber matter? Because just think of what we're doing right now. If you live in a small town Indiana, out in the country, your internet options are probably terrible. Maybe you've got one provider, maybe they charge you$100 a month for speeds that wouldn't have been good in 2015. Maybe you can't get service at all. And your kids do homework in the library parking lot so they can use the Wi-Fi. That's not a technology problem, that's a market problem. Private companies build where it's profitable. They don't build where it is not. So rural Indiana gets left behind. State owned fiber solves that. We build the backbone along with the rail corridor. Then we build the branches out to every town, every school, every farm that wants it. Universal access, not available in select areas. Every hoosier. So what does that enable? Rural kids do homework at the kitchen table, not in a parking lot. Small businesses compete globally. The woodworker in Wabash sells to customers in Europe. The graphic designer in Greencastle works for clients in California. It's not about where you are, it's about what you can do. Telehealth appointments, where grandma sees her doctor without driving an hour. The doctor ends up seeing more patients, rural health improves. This also gives us precision agriculture, sensors in the field, data in the cloud, decisions in real time, less water, less fertilizer, better yields. And this would let grandparents video call grandkids no matter where they live, not just on special occasions, but any night of the week. And here's where it gets really interesting. That fiber network isn't just for streaming and zoom, it's the nervous system of something we'll talk about in episode 22, the digital twin, a real-time digital model of Indiana's infrastructure. Every sensor, every train, every power line, every health hub, all feeding data back through that fiber, letting us manage the system as one integrated thing, not a bunch of disconnected parts. You can't do that with Comcast, you can't do that with Spectrum. They don't care about your infrastructure, they only care about your monthly payment. We can do better. Part 7. How we pay for it. Every time high-speed rail comes up in America, someone says, it's too expensive, or it'll never pay for itself. They're right about one thing: passenger rail doesn't pay for itself through ticket sales. No passenger rail system in the world does or ever has. Not Japan's, not France's, not anyone's. Because rail isn't a business. It's infrastructure. Think about a highway. Does I-65 pay for itself through tolls? No. We pay for it with gas taxes, with federal funds, with state money, and, in some places, also with tolls. In fact, just this week, Governor Braun announced that he's thinking about turning I-70 into a toll road. So you'll be paying taxes, gas taxes, and now tolls to go from Ohio to Illinois. Highways are infrastructure. They enable everything else. Same with rail. The value is not in the tickets. It's in everything the rail enables. So let me walk you through it. Increased property values near stations. That's real. In every city that's built transit, properties within walking distance of stations appreciate faster than the rest of the market. That means higher property tax revenue for local governments without raising rates. New business developments, companies locate where workers can get there, restaurants open where customers are. All of that generates tax revenue, creates jobs, builds community. This will reduce highway congestion. Every person on the train is one less car on I-65. That means less wear on the roads, less time stuck in traffic for everyone, less diesel exhaust in neighborhoods along the highway. It's hard to put a dollar value on that, but it is real. This also means lower carbon emissions because our small modular reactors power the trains. There are no tailpipes from trucks that would be carrying the materials. That's a matter of public health. For climate, for Indiana's reputation as a place that builds for the future. This provides workforce mobility. A worker in Kokomo can take a job in Indy. A student at Purdue can intern anywhere on the line. Employers can hire from the whole region, not just from their immediate area. That's economic development that doesn't require a single incentive check. And the fiber backbone? That means every Hoosier that wants to be connected can be. Every business has broadband. That's economic development too. So how do we pay for it? Pillar five is the funding flywheel and it lays this out. We'll use host community fees, which are modeled on the energy host fee we talked about. Stations generate revenue for the counties that host them, a percentage of ticket revenue plus value captured from development around the station. That money stays local. We capture the value, tax increment financing around the stations, the increased property value pays for the infrastructure that created it. We'll also use truck tolls. Out of state trucks pay for roadware. Some of that revenue supports rail. We can also use federal grants. U.S. Department of Transportation has programs for this. INFRA, CRISI, MEGA, we apply for them. We compete. We win. And finally, the Bank of Indiana. This provides us patient capital at 3 to 4%. This is not Wall Street vulture money trying to extract from our state. This is Hoosier money for Hoosier infrastructure. And here's the key. We're not asking manufacturers to gamble. We're not saying build a factory here and hope the rail comes. We show up with an order book. Phase one, Indy to Lafayette to Kokomo, committed, funded, ready to build. That is what gets suppliers to locate here. That's what gets developers to build around those stations. That's what turns a vision into reality. Part eight. The Great Railroad Revolution. This episode's featured book is The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Walmar. By the early 1900s, the United States was covered in a latticework of more than 200,000 miles of railroad track and a series of magisterial termai, all built and controlled by the biggest corporations in the land. The railroad dominated the American landscape for more than a hundred years, but by the middle of the 20th century, the automobile, the truck, and the airplane had eclipsed the railroads, and the nation started to forget them. In the Great Railroad Revolution, renowned railroad expert Christian Walmar tells the extraordinary story of the rise and fall of one of the greatest American endeavors. The time has come for America to reclaim and celebrate its often overlooked rail heritage. This book is the story of how railroads built America. Not metaphorically, literally. Walmar walks through the whole story, the transcontinental railroad, the consolidation of lines, the creation of time zones. Did you know railroads invented those? Before trains, every town kept its own time. Noon was when the sun was overhead. Railroads needed schedules, so they created standard time, the opening of the West, the growth of cities, the connection of markets. Before the railroad, America was a collection of coastal cities and scattered settlements. After the railroad, it was a nation. Here's the insight that matters for us. Railroads weren't just transportation. They were the internet of the nineteenth century. They connected markets, moved ideas, created communities. Every town that got a railroad station boomed, and every town that got bypassed withered. You can still see it today. Drive through the Midwest and look at the towns that got the railroad versus the ones that didn't. The ones that did have grand old buildings, downtowns that still have bones. The ones that didn't, well, a lot of them are not there anymore. The railroad was not just a new form of transport, it was a transformative force that changed the way people lived, worked, and thought about their country. We're just trying to do the same thing today. Just faster, just cleaner, just with better technology. High speed rail is the twenty-first century railroad revolution. And just like the nineteenth century, the places that get connected win. The places that get bypassed lose. That's why we're not just building a line from Indy to Chicago and calling it done. That's the old model. Connect the big cities, ignore everything in between. That's what the interstates did. We're building a network, a spine, with stations in the towns that lost their main streets, with connections to every corner of the state over time, with fiber to every farm. Walmart's book is a reminder that infrastructure isn't just concrete and steel, it's possibility. It's connection. It's the physical foundation of community. We built that once and we can build it again. Part nine. Objections and responses. Nobody will ride it. Look at the Indy Lafayette Corridor. 15,000 vehicles a day. Many of them commuters. Purdue has 50,000 students, faculty, staff. Indianapolis has 200,000 commuters from those surrounding counties. Give those people a 30-minute train instead of a 60 to 90 minute drive, and they will ride. Give them Wi-Fi, a nice seat, the ability to work or read or just not deal with traffic, they'll ride. Second is it's too expensive. High speed rail costs fifty to a hundred million dollars per mile. The Innovation Triangle is roughly a hundred and fifty miles. That's seven and a half to fifteen billion dollars over ten to fifteen years. Now compare that to highway expansion. Widening I-65 through Indianapolis alone is billions. The North Split reconstruction in Indy? Hundreds of millions. The new bridge over the Ohio billions. We're spending that money anyway. The question is whether we spend it on infrastructure that moves trucks a little bit faster, or on infrastructure that rebuilds communities, connects people, and generates value for generations. Next is eminent domain abuse. This is a real concern. People have lost homes to highway projects. It's happened, it's wrong. That's why we propose Amendment One, the Infrastructure Corridors Amendment. This includes strict protections, fair market value, relocation assistance, community benefit agreements must also be included. No one loses their home without full compensation and a better option. And here's the thing we're not carving through neighborhoods. We're using existing corridors, highway medians, abandoned rail lines, state owned land. We can build this without taking people's homes. Next is why don't we just improve what we have? Amtrak's Hoosier State Line runs indie to Chicago once a day, thirty miles per hour average, on tracks owned by freight railroads that prioritize their own trains and their own profits. We don't own the tracks, we don't control the schedule, we are a guest on someone else's infrastructure. That's not a service, that's a courtesy. Real infrastructure means ownership, control, the ability to decide as Hoosier's how our system runs. And last we have the old trustee, this will never happen politically. Every successful infrastructure project in American history was called impossible until it was built. The Transcontinental Railroad? Impossible. But we built it. The Interstate Highway Ssible. We built that. The Apollo program? Guess what? They called that impossible, and we put a man on the moon. Too hard is not an argument against what is right. It's an argument for trying harder. Part ten. Conclusion and preview. Here's where we are. A crossroads is where things pass through. A spine is what holds the body together. We've been a crossroads long enough. Pass through economy, bypass towns, disconnected communities. It's time to be a spine. The Innovation Triangle connects our major cities. It connects our research university to our manufacturing base. It connects our defense industry to our workforce. It creates new main streets in towns that once lost theirs. It carries the fiber that connects every Hoosier. It runs on the power that we own. And it integrates everything else we're building. Pillar one, electric trains powered by our small modular reactors. Pillar three, high-speed rail moves hemp materials, grain, Indiana Premium Products. Pillar four, health hubs co-located at high-speed rail stations serving surrounding communities. Pillar five, host community fees from stations, fund local services. And the Bank of Indiana provides the patient capital. Here is what I want you to picture. Indiana 2040. You live in Kokomo, you work in Indy, you take the train every morning, 30 minutes, Wi-Fi, coffee, get a head start on your day. Then you're home in time for dinner, and you don't have to deal with the interstates. You coach your kids' soccer team. Maybe your kid goes to Purdue, comes home for dinner any day of the week, not just holidays or on break, just a regular Tuesday because it's 20 minutes. Your parents live in Lafayette. You see them on the weekend, not just uh during a road trip that you dread. A 20-minute train ride. You can bring the kids, they see their grandparents, it becomes normal. Your son-in-law works at the hemp processing plant in Kokomo. The materials he processes go on the night train to Indy, where they become furniture, building materials, automotive parts. Indiana grown, Indiana made, sold to the world. Your granddaughter has a doctor's appointment at the health hub attached to the Frankfurt station. Same building where you catch the train. Same visit. No extra trip. That's not a fantasy, that's an achievable timeline. A choice. A future we can build. Next week in Episode 7, The Last Mile and the Light Beam, we talk about universal fiber optics, state-owned, co-located within the rail, what it means to connect every Hoosier with a line in the ground. I'm Corey, this is the Indiana Sentry Podcast. And remember, sovereignty isn't given, it is built in the middle of the podcast.