[ardecila]

What trains? This is providing new service. You can argue about the cost, but keep in mind that anything is an upgrade over the current situation in the corridor.

Ohio's plans will offer 3 daily trains, in each direction, at every point along the corridor. Two trains between Cincinnati and Columbus, two between Columbus and Cleveland, and one that does the whole length between Cincinnati and Cleveland, for a grand total of 5 trains.

This is almost the exact same situation that Illinois has on the line between Chicago, Champaign-Urbana, and Carbondale - which is essentially our "College Express", with 3 round trips a day. Those lines have been extremely popular with students, which provide much of the ridership. They have shown themselves very willing to ride the trains back home to Chicago if the tickets are priced low and the departure times aren't in the middle of the night. Driving may be a bit faster, but quite a few of the college students do not have cars, or if they do, chose not to bring their cars to campus for various reasons.

Now, the Carbondale Amtrak station is kind of an ugly, small building, but it's far better than the glorified bus shelters that some towns have. And Champaign's Amtrak station is integrated with a bus terminal for city buses, Greyhound, Trailways, etc - it's a generous building. It looks like Ohio is preparing to build several stations of this magnitude, which may explain part of the $300m.