'I got $60 billion for you': President Joe Biden, in Delaware, announces new train projects
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President Joe Biden, like many presidents before him, stood in front of Delaware workers on Monday and promised jobs.
“I got about 60 billion dollars for you,” he said, leaning in with a conspiratorial smile as he shook the hand of a worker outside the Amtrak heavy maintenance facility in Bear.
The president had arrived at the trainyard a bit after noon to tout $16 billion in new funding for train projects along the Northeast Corridor from Washington, D.C., to Boston. More than $66 billion in passenger rail investments were pledged as part of the 2021 Infrastructure Law.
The new funding includes $3.8 billion to help expand the Hudson River Tunnel between New Jersey and New York, and $4.7 billion to replace the train tunnel passing under parts of Baltimore, smoothing passage through what White House officials called the busy Northeast Corridor’s largest bottleneck.
Those projects would account for 100,000 union jobs, according to the White House.
Outside the facility, the president took a moment instead to marvel at the previous night’s Philadelphia Eagles victory over the Dallas Cowboys.
“They say it’s a game of inches,” the President said. “But I never believed it until last night. It was all inches.”
Biden then launched into a jocular story whose punchline was the millions of miles he has traveled on Amtrak trains. The president repeated this story minutes later inside the facility, addressing a wall of reporters and cameras who seemed almost to outnumber the more than 70 Amtrak workers taking a day out to hear the president speak.
Though Amtrak's Northeast corridor passes through Wilmington, the largest projects outlined by the President will not take place in Delaware. The president cited his long connection to Amtrak in Delaware as the reason for announcing the train infrastructure funding in his home state.
“Delaware, trains and Joe Biden go together, plain and simple,” said Delaware Gov. John Carney, speaking before Biden at the event.
Delaware Democratic Senators Chris Coons and Tom Carper also spoke in support of Biden’s infrastructure plan.
Bear Amtrak worker Sterling Rapposelli Jr. introduced the president, arriving onstage with his brother and nephew, also Amtrak employees. Rapposelli said workers at the Bear Amtrak plant had known the president for so long they called him, simply, “Uncle Joe.”
Biden's long connection to Amtrak forged by personal tragedy
Perhaps no president in recent memory has been more closely associated with Amtrak than Joe Biden, a connection hard-forged by grief.
”Folks here in Delaware know that as a senator I rode the train back and forth between Washington and Wilmington virtually every day for 36 years when I got elected,” Biden said at the event. “Amtrak wasn’t just a way to get home to my family. The conductors and engineers became my family.”
After Biden lost his wife and daughter to a tragic car crash in 1972, Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor was the tether connecting Biden to his two young sons, injured in the crash and left without a mother.
As a Delaware senator, he logged more than 2 million miles on those tracks— riding 90 minutes each way between Wilmington and Washington to spend evenings with his family.
When Biden first took the oath as Vice President in 2009, it was a train that took him and then President-elect Barack Obama there — after an hourlong whistle-stop in Wilmington at the station that now bears his name.
And when Obama's presidency ended eight years later, it was a train that took him home.
Biden seemed to be roused by that long experience while bemoaning the delays that Amtrak passengers have come to take for granted while traveling through the 150-year-old Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel, whose tight curves require trains to slow to 30 miles an hour to pass through safely.
Its planned $6 billion replacement, the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, would allow speeds of 110 miles an hour when completed.
“I've traveled through that tunnel literally thousands of times,” Biden said of the Baltimore and Potomac tunnel. “Trust me, I know:... The roof of that tunnel is leaking. The floor is literally sinking. This is the United States of America, for God's sake. The United States of America. We know we're better than that.”
Outline of $16 billion infrastructure investments
The largest construction projects among the $16 billion in new passenger rail funding include the following:
Gateway Hudson River Tunnel (New York/New Jersey): $3.8 billion: The project will renovate and expand the century-old tunnel between New York and New Jersey, which was damaged by Superstorm Sandy. This new sum will bring the total investment in the project to $11 billion.
Frederick Douglass Tunnel (Maryland): $4.7 billion. The 150-year-old Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel, which the White House called “the largest Northeast Corridor bottleneck between Washington and New Jersey,” will be replaced by a new Frederick Douglass Tunnel. The estimated completion date is 2035.
Susquehanna River Bridge (Maryland): $2.1 billion. The existing 100-year-old rail bridge over the Susquehanna River near Perryville will be replaced by two new two-track bridges, allowing train speeds to increase from 90 miles and hour to 120 miles an hour.
Penn Station Access (New York): $1.6 billion. The project will rehabilitate 19 miles of track of Amtrak’s Hell Gate line. White House officials estimate the project will cut transit time between Manhattan and the Bronx by as much as 50 minutes. The project, already under construction, will also create four new ADA-accessible rail stations.
The Connecticut River Bridge (Connecticut): $827 million. The century-old bridge will be replaced by a new one, increasing train speeds from 45 mph to 70 mph. The project is projected to begin construction in 2024.
Matthew Korfhage is business and development reporter in the Delaware region covering all the things that touch land and money: openings and closings, construction, and the many corporations who call the First State home. Send tips and insults to mkorfhage@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: President Biden in Delaware to announce billions in Amtrak funding
