[Busy Bee]

Besides the lack of capital funding, the biggest barriers to implementing electrification on other lines is it being a priority of Metra. The benefits of electrification are additional schedule capacity due to acceleration performance, lower long term maintenance costs to motive power rolling stock, energy savings over volatile diesel fuel, and related of course, the elimination of carbon emissions from the trains themselves. The reason it seems to not be a priority is that Metra does not see the aforementioned benefits to be enough to justify the capital expense (which would also include new rolling stock and a list of other required modifications), funds they don't even come close to having by the way, outside of a corridor where it makes the absolute most sense with all the right characteristics - and that is the RI District. Another theory, of mine at least, is that in the United States, as we all know, transport op's and transport infra is grotesquely under-invested in and when you add in our geographic and cultural isolation, there is a real lack of peer pressure to modernize our systems, out of shame or out of pride, and on the administrative level a real lack of vision and ambition, still today, which stems from decades of becoming accustomed and satisfied with bare-bones operation and, well, decay due to the starvation of funding and prioritizing and subsidization of auto movement over railways.