Rail plan carries hefty price tag In infrastructure bill, Congress is poised to approve $66 billion for railroads — but is that enough to meet Connecticut’s needs?
By Mark Pazniokas
At a time of hype and headlines about trillions the president wants to invest in infrastructure, a railroad man with a long memory oversees the Department of Transportation in Connecticut, a state that’s been an unreliable steward of rail since the neglected New Haven Line was left to its care half a century ago.
Joseph J. Giulietti, recruited as DOT commissioner immediately after Gov. Ned Lamont’s election in 2018, started on the New Haven Line in 1971 as a 19-yearold conductor for Penn Central, then a dying railroad about to cede ownership of the line to a state unready for the responsibility.
He was there when Penn Central gasped its last and yielded management of commuter rail to Conrail in 1976, and when Metro-North was born as a subsidiary of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and took over in 1983. Giulietti left in 1998 for a rail job in Florida, returning in 2014 as Metro-North’s president.
Giulietti is 69 now, and the DOT is the last stop in a 50-year career that neatly coincides with passenger rail’s transition to a wholly governmental responsibility. The buzz in Washington is that Congress is poised to make its biggest investment in rail since it created Amtrak from the ruins of 20 private railroads in 1971.
Joe Biden became a regular Amtrak passenger two years later, a senator who would commute from Delaware to Washington for 36 years. The new House Appropriations chair is Rosa L. DeLauro of New Haven, an Amtrak regular since taking office 30 years ago. And Amtrak Joe is in the White House now.
Behind the headlines are hard realities. The political coalition behind the infrastructure bill