Politics

Author: Richard R. Tryon and others

Do we need a National and State partnership with well-connected private enterprise to manage and encourage those voting to support their noble plan to get people to ride and not drive?
By Richard R. Tryon May 16, 2017

Letter to Dave Cieslewicz in response to his diatribe against Gov.Walker who caused investors to lose a few millions plus failing to capture hundreds of millions more just to start a plan to link cities with rail service slower than what was found in the 1930's.

I am not sure where your bias originated for the love of the idea of a return to the European idea that we should not have copied the German autobahn road system, but stuck to the very highly developed system in our much larger area of depending on our natural rivers, canals and configuration thousands of trains, inter-urbans and both local and long distance tracks to move people, mail, and freight.

To force Wisconsin's commuters along the lines from Madison to Milwauke or Kenosha to use four trains on the links to and from Milwaukee was both and out of date idea and one that no profit seeking organization would study and seek to be permitted to do it. But Talgo of Spain, seeking more foreign orders, managed to get two prospects by helping them get many millions of federal money to support what also fit well with the 'progressive' or socialist idea of leaders in Milwaukee, the most important big city in all of Wisconsin.

Why not combine its idea with one in Portland, Oregon that is also enamored with the idea of curtailing auto use in favor of longer times on a train plus bus transfers to or from start and ending points of twice a day efforts. These leaders do not object to making people conform as long ago they did in the age of assembly line manufacturing in which the team never failed to be present and able for each of three shifts, and all other activities were back in the local neighborhood. Little was carried back and forth. Today's complex life styles are vastly different and most no longer live the above life. Furthermore the technologies have changed in ways that fit far better using the super highways and soon without using materials thought to be able to overpower nature's historic command of climate.

In 1940 at age 8 one of my first boyhood dreams was to make a huge steam locomotive move! I had seen so many 25 miles from NYC four blocks from my family's home in Harrington Park, NJ on the Erie RR line that took my father to the ferry to NYC and brought mail to our tiny community of about 500 families. Mail carriers delivered to our house twice a day six days per week, but special delivery letters which cost twenty-five cents instead of three cents, needed to be sent out immediately on receipt at the local post office. I was paid $.11 per delivery of such letters.

More importantly, I got to talk to the engineer when the train came each morning at 7:05 and that gave me time to work and still get to school on time, and the kind engineer one day asked if I would like to drive the train? I only moved it a few feet before I had to jump back onto the RR Express wagon so the train could res-start almost without fully stopping. I have been in love with model trains and railroading ever since!

But a practical side of my character was taught by that job too! Don't spend money for something to sell to the public that not many people can use at a price that the provider can't cover. However, the Governor before Walker in WI found that not to be a problem as long as the federal government could pay more than enough to make it seem to work with special benefits to those involved, free of risk! Its easy to win votes in WI with the plan to build a fast speed track and buy equipment for two whole trains to run on its Hiawatha line from Chicago to Milwaukee. “In the 1930s the same trip took 75 minutes on the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad's Hiawatha.[5] “This proposed new service was inferior!

A similar offering was allowed by the federal fiscal budget to provide improved service between Milwaukee and Madison. No sign of what that meant in terms of ridership, time to travel point to point. Long ago, before intercity roads were more than a collection of short pieces between various city or county lines assembled and labeled for those wanting to drive less reliable autos, subject to many problems no longer a concern to railroading or taxi cabs that were low cost too. But who used to go daily between Madison and Milwaukee? Many political, medical, educational and industrial workers in the 1930s must have depended on the trains for the up to 79 miles in 1hr 22min by road from the downtown Mariott hotel in Milwaukee to the Hilton in Madison. If riders needed only 1 hour on the fast train but also needed 15 minutes at each end to get to and from start to finish points, the car now can cover the 79 miles faster and cheaper! Perhaps the planners for the tax supported subsidy knew this and could make a subsidy that covered the cost of about two gallons of gas for the trip, but travelers might also have multiple stops to make en-route or in the destination city. This leads ridership level of expectations to be somewhat fuzzy.

The ROI on cost of roadbed property, stations, and much more must have scarred Gov. Walker into wondering what kind of credit would fall on his administration if $7 million annual cost turned into a $30-40 millon one? Yes, short-term benefits were possible and short-term losses could have been much smaller if prior politically driven actions had not required so many dollars up front from WI?

Suddenly, one can see how the Doyle, - Barrett plan can be seen a bit differently as one huge boondoggle! A short-term appearance of jobs suddenly needing far more than two trains to shuttle back and forth after cleaning and crew changes are accommodated. What 3-4 round trips between in each 12 hour operating day. Reliable service requires back ups of crew and equipment. Small loads means fewer cars and passenger needs for extra services being carried at a loss. The 1950-2000 growth of the interstate has perhaps spoiled the public into preferring many considerations dealing with meeting the RR schedule vs your personal one. At last we see the collectivist hand about forcing all to fit into the needs of the community, not the individual.

Like the Pharoahs of Egypt who made the poor join with slaves to build pyramids, we see a way to make work and collect votes using the guise of needing conformity to saving the environmental quality of live – especially in the cities where crowding and higher living expense prevails

This, I suspect, is the real issue today in Wisconsin and the two points involved are strongholds of one political party that will continue to misuse the costly approach that was aborted as a political argument. But, does it really make sense to think that a huge part of industry needs a RR to get to work in one of these two or perhaps 3-4 cities along the route where waiting buses will meet the train and get commuters to work on time? Teamwork today requires on-time arrival and weather delays are costly. Most don't drive 80 miles to work.

Can the algorithms be employed with such sophistication as to know why riders will or will not make the train today? I contend that A/I can assign values to any conceivable factor; but have a very hard time knowing when all such results in a smaller or larger load on the train. Remember, its not just the individual variations, but weather and impact of many political, economic, religious, social, cultural and calendar considerations that change so fast as to make predictions high risk notions.

Does this give you pause? Or just renewed force to make the preferred reading of what the past may have gained or lost for citizens in every corner of the state?

I encourage you to keep on tryon, as I do to convince all that Gov. Walker not only threw away a huge federal boondoggle but caused the players in the 2008-9 scheme to lose. Of course, the federal money aimed at helping so few is now a part of the national income tax not needed. You could respond and note that once the plan was done and the Interstate roads involved could make huge cuts in their maintenance cost from lack of use, not transferring such costs to RR right-of-way to be subsidized by a national RR network, we would be well on the way to saving the environmental concerns for lack of burning gasoline. But, what if by then our infant man made emulation of the leaf was using Sun light and is energy to make hydrogen in your back yard to be cheaply converted into high p.s.i. quantities for your car? Suddenly people could drive to work on their own schedule and not feel like they were changing the climate! Of course, nature would go right on doing it for us.

So, I join with the people of WI who don't live in Madison and Milwaukee. They should turn their thinking to their local areas. The old RR tracks are now bike trails but surely a narrow gauge people mover can be able to share that physical space to help those wanting to ride instead of pedaling in rain, sleet or snow or the heat of the summer get to the University and the government buildings so that the roads will be less crowded by those in electric cars powered by hydrogen that also charges the battery.













You thought Wisconsin losing high-speed rail was bad?
It actually just got worse
BY DAVE CIESLEWICZ JULY 24, 2014

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DAVID MICHAEL MILLER

It's hard to get your head around the rapid turn of events that has taken Wisconsin out of the lead for a 21st-century transportation system and plunged us into the Dark Ages.
Let's get caught up.
In 2009, then Gov. Jim Doyle joined forces with Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett to convince train manufacturer Talgo to locate in Milwaukee. The city of Milwaukee invested $10 million for site improvements at the old Tower Automotive plant in a neighborhood that needed the jobs and the reinvestment. Wisconsin ordered two trains for the state-sponsored Milwaukee to Chicago Hiawatha service. In addition, Talgo had an order for two trains for use in Oregon and Washington that would also be built in Milwaukee.
Then Doyle famously secured $810 million in federal stimulus money to build higher-speed rail from Chicago to Milwaukee to Madison with the promise of eventually connecting the line to the Twin Cities. And, of course, those train sets would have been built in Milwaukee too.
A year later Barrett vied for the governor's office against Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker. The train plan was a centerpiece of Walker's campaign, in which he essentially ran against the interests of his own county. Walker portrayed the train as a boondoggle, but he was essentially using it as leverage to exploit resentment in the rest of the state against its two largest cities.
Walker won and trains lost. He quickly moved to kill the Milwaukee to Madison part of the project, but he claimed to support upgrades to the Hiawatha line. Meanwhile, Talgo was already well along in the construction of two sets of trains to serve that line. In fact, the state has already paid Talgo $40 million for those trains, and it paid another $12 million to other vendors, for a total cost so far of $52 million.


But Walker, apparently backed into a corner by extremist legislators who were even more anti-train than he was, decided to renege on even the Hiawatha trains.
So Talgo filed a claim against the state for an additional $66 million in unpaid invoices and other losses due to the deal gone bad. That claim was recently denied by the state as expected, and a formal lawsuit is likely.
To add insult to injury, in May the completed trains were unceremoniously moved from the now abandoned Milwaukee Talgo plant for Indiana, where it is possible they will become part of the Wolverine line connecting Chicago to Detroit. And, in fact, Illinois is paying for an extension of Amtrak service to Rockford, and plans are in place to also go from Rockford to Dubuque. From there it's not hard to imagine completing the line to the Twin Cities and bypassing Wisconsin altogether.
Walker claimed that he opposed the 100% federally funded train because of the annual operating costs to the state, which amounted to around $7 million. But now the state is on the line for as much as $118 million, for which it will have received nothing at all. In other words, for the dollars the governor has put at risk, the state could have funded the new train operation for about a decade and a half.
Had Walker not been elected governor, the Chicago to Milwaukee to Madison service would have started a year ago. Sleek new trains would have been connecting us and providing economic development opportunities not just in Milwaukee but in other places along the line. A train station near Monona Terrace would be bustling and contributing to a revival of that portion of Madison's downtown. Even more importantly, Wisconsin would have been literally on the map as the first place in the country outside of the northeast corridor to be served by new higher-speed passenger rail.
Instead, Wisconsin now ranks a consistent 37th in job creation under Walker, the Talgo plant and its Milwaukee jobs are gone, the Madison station never happened and the ancillary development around it is on the ropes, our own tax dollars are on their way to build the same kind of system in other states, and we're still on the hook for as much as $118 million. Even if we don't end up paying out that much, every dollar that is lost will be lost completely.
Our tax dollars were vaporized simply because Scott Walker found it politically useful to exploit hard feelings between rural and urban Wisconsin. And how exactly did it end up benefiting someone in, say, Grantsburg that Milwaukee and Madison got left holding the bag and every taxpayer in the state is shelling out millions for nothing at all?
Before this state administration can get serious about asking for more tax dollars for transportation (a cause I'm not entirely unsympathetic to) it needs to explain why we should trust that administration when it turned an $800 million positive investment in our transportation future into a $100 million liability with nothing to show for it.
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. He blogs as Citizen Dave.