WASHINGTON – Today, in response to a statement by U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) that funding is needed to make critical safety and structural improvements to the Northeast Corridor, the nation’s busiest passenger rail corridor, Secretary Anthony Foxx of the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) confirmed the importance of the rail line to the entire Northeast, and the DOT’s efforts to secure $550 million to upgrade and maintain the Corridor. As a member of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, Murphy holds jurisdiction over funding for investments in transportation and rail infrastructure.

Today’s exchange between Murphy and Foxx occurred during a U.S. Senate Appropriations Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Subcommittee hearing on the FY15 DOT budget request.

The text of Senator Murphy’s exchange with Secretary Foxx is below:

SENATOR MURPHY: “Thank you, first, for making your first official visit when you were confirmed as Secretary to New Haven, Connecticut. We appreciated that in part because of the attention that you were paying then, and have paid to the Northeastern rail corridor…and I wanted to drill down on the Northeastern rail corridor.

“We’re talking about a section of the country that’s only about 2% of the nation’s land mass but has 20% of the rail traffic and about 19% of the nation’s GDP. And when I heard Senator Daines talk about a pipe which was constructed and welded in 1950, I think about how envious we would be of construction that was only 60 years old when it comes to the rail lines and the bridges that run up the Northeast Corridor. We’ve got a bridge in Norwalk that you know a lot about, that opens occasionally when we want it to open, because it was built in the Grover Cleveland administration, and we are finally – thanks to your help – rebuilding that bridge.
“But I want to thank you for your recognition that the Northeastern rail corridor just cannot continue to, sort of, tread along at the current funding pace. And so you’ve got a proposal here which is really important, setting aside a certain amount of money, not nearly enough, but an important signal of commitments in the future to do specific work on the Northeastern rail corridor.

“And I just want to allow you the chance to explain why you’ve proposed in this budget a specific matching grant for the Northeastern rail corridor and how important you believe that is to trying to make sure that we don’t have a disaster by virtue of one of these 118-year-old bridges failing up and down that corridor.”

SECRETARY FOXX: “The Northeast Corridor is a critical lifeline for many people. If you compare it to airline travel between, say Washington, D.C. and New York, 3 out of every 4 trips is taken by rail – not the other way. So it’s a very important corridor for us. It is also a corridor, as you point out, that in some cases is moving past its useful life in terms of the actual infrastructure. And one thing we can’t afford in a place where so many people count on rail as a lifeline, is something to happen with the infrastructure that would result in a loss of life or a long-term stoppage in our ability to move people. It would create a traffic disaster in the Northeast if we didn’t have that Northeast Corridor behind us.

“So our Fiscal Year 2016 budget request contains $550 million specifically for the Northeast Corridor, much of it specifically for state of good repair. Just to get us back in the business of trying to update what we have. I think long-term, we need to have a much bigger vision for the Northeast. I think the service should be faster, I think we should think in terms of making sure that we have a stepped up level of safety features on all aspects of our rail systems in the Northeast, and this could be the subject of not only public funding, but it also could be the subject of public-private partnership as well.

“And so we are working, actually, to develop a strategy around this along with the Northeast Corridor Commission and I think that over time we’re going to see some big things happen in the Northeast Corridor. And it’s important that it happen because some of the infrastructure up there may have a life-span of say 20 more years, and if we wait too long to start fixing it, we’re going to find ourselves not having that great asset.”