The train tracks on the Amtrak route between St. Louis and Chicago now have all been replaced.
This is part of the project to bring the trains’ top speed to 110 mph – up from 79 – and it’ll be a smoother ride, Amtrak board member Tom Carper said at a ceremony in Granite City.
“Between here and St. Louis, some of our passengers ride on rail that … wobbles and it wiggles a little bit, but this is going to change that. Sometimes they’d hear the clickety-clack that you hear in the opening of some Broadway musicals or some movies. Well, that’s going to go away also, with this welded rail,” said Carper, the former mayor of Macomb.
The new rail project involved replacing 500 miles of tracks, replacing 646,000 wooden railroad ties with concrete ties, and replacing 1.3 million tons of ballast.
The high-speed rail project still requires grade-crossing and signal improvements and the construction of sidings. By the end of next year, two-thirds of the route should be running at 110 mph. At this time, trains are running at that speed only between Pontiac and Dwight, about 15 miles.
The trip between St. Louis and Chicago now runs 5½ hours; it should he a half hour shorter by the end of 2015, and another half hour shorter by the end of 2017. The project’s price: $1.7 billion. New rail cars, manufactured in Rochelle, will start to debut in mid-2016.