Former FRA Chief Sees Rail Overhaul

"What he’s really talking about ... is Phase I of the Interstate II idea.”

For years, former Federal Railroad Administrator Gilbert E. Carmichael has nurtured a vision of how to merge high-speed rail transit needs with the freight railroad system to change the entire face of U.S. freight transportation.

Now, with President Obama putting heavy spending levels behind his own fast-train concepts, and simultaneously pushing a rapid deployment of new electrical transmission lines, Carmichael thinks the pieces are falling into place.

Carmichael told The Journal of Commerce he’s long been calling for a major initiative, which he dubs “Interstate II,” that could rapidly start building high-speed passenger rail systems in the rights of way of the sprawling freight railroad network.

When he saw the Obama team unexpectedly tuck $8 billion into the recovery act to jumpstart high-speed rail in several corridors, along with a push to update the power grid and make it easier for distant wind farms to deliver their electrons, the former top rail safety regulator got excited.

“What he’s really talking about with his high-speed corridors is, (that) this is Phase I of the Interstate II idea,” Carmichael said of Obama’s plans. And, “if we do it right then we’re building something dramatically superior to the Interstate Highway System.”

Carmichael headed the FRA under President George H.W. Bush. Now he is both senior chairman of the University of Denver’s Intermodal Transportation Institute and president of his own company, Missouth Properties in Meridian, Miss.

He said for high-speed rail, or HSR, to get going quickly, its only real option is to negotiate use of the freight rail corridors. Otherwise it would take years of seeking permits and vast extra costs to build new track networks from scratch.

But putting HSR in mainline freight corridors across the United States means those lines would have to be at least double-tracked, or even tripled, so faster passenger trains and slower freight trains can operate without getting in each other’s way.