Six years ago, upgrading a formerly double-track main line like Gulf, Mobile & Ohio's original route between Chicago and St. Louis to 110-mph standards within seven years must have seemed eminently possible. That was the goal when the Federal Railroad Administration began awarding over $1.5 billion in stimulus grants. The idea was to create a mostly single-track railroad with the capacity to accommodate faster and more frequent passenger trains while not impeding, perhaps even enhancing, host Union Pacific's freight operations.

PAIN FOR GAIN

Performing environmental outreach, creating detailed engineering plans, finalizing construction contracts, and completing work that necessitates track outages has been time-consuming and disruptive to existing Lincoln Service trains. This has also been true in the Chicago-Detroit and New Haven, Conn.-Springfield, Mass., corridors where similar upgrades are taking place.

In November, buses substituted for trains south of Bloomington-Normal, Ill., and the Texas Eagle detoured on Union Pacific's former Chicago & Eastern Illinois for two days while a section of track was replaced. This relatively minor Friday-Saturday hiatus was preceded by four years of week-long, spring-through-fall, construction-related cancellations over parts of the route. Rebuilding passing sidings from 14-foot centers (the distance between the midpoint of rails) to 20-foot centers hurts reliability, because trains are delayed for extended periods at meets.

Such interference has contributed to more than a 16-percent ridership decline and more than a 12-percent drop in ticket revenue for Lincoln Service trains since fiscal 2013.

PROVING PERFORMANCE

With the Sept. 30, 2017, deadline for spending much of the federal money rapidly approaching,...