http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-b...rticleId=32548
High-speed rail's price tag doubles
By: Paul Merrion October 26, 2009
Illinois has nearly doubled the amount of funding it's seeking from Washington, D.C., to create a high-speed rail line that would cut the five-and-a-half-hour trip between Chicago and St. Louis to just under four hours.
In August, the state's preliminary estimates pegged the Chicago-St. Louis route improvements at about $2.4 billion. But the state's latest estimate stands at $4.5 billion, according to a proposal submitted to the feds this month.
Illinois first hopes to spend $1.2 billion on long-planned improvements on the existing Chicago-St. Louis Amtrak route, which will reduce the travel time by 80 minutes. The
additional $3.2 billion the state now seeks is for a parallel second track along most of the route that would allow more freight and passenger trains to run at the same time. The double-tracking, however, will cut only another 20 minutes off the trip.
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(A two-hour trip time to St Louis) would cost $12 billion to $13 billion, he estimates, in line with
a detailed, 256-page proposal for a complete Midwest high-speed rail system centered on Chicago that French National Railways, known by its French acronym,
SNCF, filed recently with the Federal Railroad Administration.
At a cost of
$68.5 billion, SNCF says it would first build a Milwaukee-Chicago-Detroit route, connecting
through O'Hare International Airport, followed by Chicago-St. Louis and other Midwest routes in the long-range future. Profits generated by the first route would pay for almost half the cost of building out the system, SNCF contends.
"We see the Midwest as an important and sustainable corridor for true high-speed rail," says Lindsay Simmons, an attorney for SNCF in Washington, D.C.
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This is the first time I've seen any concrete, specific (including a price estimate) Chicago area HSR proposal by a real, experienced developer.
Edit: I see the SNCF proposal came up a month ago in a Midwest rail thread, probably when the news came out. Not sure if it was covered here though.