(erielack) Potential passenger service on the EL Niagara Branch?

["J. Henry Priebe Jr." <root_@_bluemoon.net>]

One of my customers sells wind turbines and is into all things "green" these
days. He lives not too far from me in North Buffalo so he bikes over his
invoice remittance every summer and we jaw about environmental issues. Today's
conversation naturally covered weaning the U.S. off of foreign oil. One of his
pet projects is to try to force the NFTA (Niagara Frontier Tramsit Authority)
to make good on their promise to use the Erie's Niagara Branch from Main St in
Buffalo to Tonawanda. He thinks the continuing rise in the price of oil will
prompt area residents to demand more local rail transportation, specifically
on the EL line to Tonawanda. He and his like minded cohorts successfully
lobbied against a housing project that would have built on the EL ROW and are
pushing for its use as a rail trail in the short term to prevent developers
from gobbling it up in the near future so the rail option is preserved. He
really thinks that it will become a light rail some time in the future.

I'm quite skeptical about it as I know that the developers have this area's
politicians in their pockets and always have. Rail lines are so expensive to
build these days that I just don't see the city, county, state and feds
ponying up the cash to do it any time soon. I expect this country to go into a
fairly deep recession over the next couple of years as oil prices double and
maybe triple. The uber-liberals seem to think that they can pay for whatever
they want to do by taxing the life out of the "rich" people and corporations,
but that's just not realistic.

It's obvious that we need to utilize all forms of rail transportation as much
as we can to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but someone has to pay for
that to happen. Money's become tighter than ever and with "universal" health
care, a broken social security system and a broken education system, I don't
see any budget surpluses for hundreds of rail projects happening any time
soon. Maybe it can be dome for Big Cities like NYC, Chicago and LA, but not
for poor little rust belted Western NY, Albany's unwanted step-child.

Henry

J. Henry Priebe Jr.    Blue Moon Internet Corp Network Administrator
www.bluemoon.net       Internet Access & Web Hosting
www.railfan.net        Railfan Network Services


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