Andy loves fast trains, hates cost

Gov. Cuomo said Thursday that he wants to bring high speed rail to New York — but he has serious sticker shock over the price of previous proposals to to speed up train service between New York City and upstate.

The governor announced that he will convene “outside experts to reexamine and rethink strategies to bring high speed rail” to the state as a part of his 2020 agenda.

He said the conventional wisdom around railroad infrastructure is flawed, citing the team of academics who in January pitched a new strategy to speed up repairs of the Hurricane Sandy-damaged L train tunnel.

“This kind of outside-the-box thinking will help us determine how we could deliver high speed rail for New York,” Cuomo said.

Cuomo has failed to upgrade New York’s regional rail network during his 10 years in office. It still takes more than nine hours to travel between Manhattan and Niagara Falls by train, two hours longer than an average car trip.

Days after he was elected to his first term in 2010, Cuomo wrote a letter to then-U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood requesting the feds give New York the high speed rail money other states rejected as part of President Barack Obama’s stimulus package.

In 2014 the Federal Railroad Administration released an environmental impact study laying out the feasibility of converting Amtrak’s Empire Corridor to high speed rail.

The study found that world-class high speed rail that tops out at more than 150 mph was too expensive to get done. One option to build new tracks that could carry trains at up to 160 mph would have cost $27 billion, and another to hit speeds of 220 mph would have cost $39 billion, the study revealed.

The fastest option the FRA found to be feasible was one that would top out at 125 mph, which would cost $14.7 billion and would shave three hours off the trip from New York City to Niagara Falls.