THE "NEW" ERIE CANAL
By George E. Lerrigo
North Bennington, VT
Thomas Jefferson, our third president, looked up at the two men in his office and said: “It is a splendid project and it may be executed a century hence…and you talk of making a canal three hundred and fifty miles long through the wilderness! It is a little short of madness to think about it!” He spoke to Judge Forman and Will Kirkpatrick who had been sent to Washington from Albany in 1806 to see if federal help would be available to New York State for a canal project. Jefferson's answer assured them: New York would have to go it alone to build the Erie Canal.
It was a daunting task. At this time our nation was a coastal nation with only a few passages west through the Appalachian Mountains. There were only three roads west, including the new national road from Washington. The Erie Canal would follow one of the few natural routes that could reach the waters of the West (today’s Midwest and our Great Lakes).
It took a strong politician to lead this effort and defy the thinking of the time that ours would be a coastal nation only. Dewitt Clinton was an early advocate of opening up travel westward. However, construction of the Canal waited until 1817 because of the war of 1812. New York went ahead with local money at the impossible sum of $7 million dollars. Engineers and other trained resources? Training had to be “on the job”. Define the route? It took the Canal Commission countless hours and days to plan the route. Seven years later, when the completion of the Erie Canal connected Albany to Buffalo, there was one steamboat on Lake Erie. That connection caused the development of great ports and numerous steam and sailboat lines in hundreds of Midwest locations. Did the canal bankrupt New York State as its opponents had predicted? No. The Canal was a tremendous success. Bonds to fund the canal sold well in New York City, near the old Dutch wall in New York, providing the first American investments for what was to become Wall Street finance. The tolls collected for Erie Canal use paid back the entire cost to New York in 10 short years! Even the Canal’s shorter segments sped commerce and quickly paid for themselves. The canal brought more people into New York State: eventually 13 canals were built that put over 90% of New York’s population within 10 miles of a navigable water route. This figure still holds. People came to build cities. And prosperity came. Great cities grew up all the way West to Lake Erie: Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo. Ironically New York City, which had been a second-class port, grew to be our greatest city thanks to canals reaching our hinterland.
Today, 140 years after the Erie Canal was opened, we stand before a new opportunity. High-speed passenger rail service CAN be our new Erie Canal. Rail service has been around almost as long as the canal (the third oldest rail line, the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, connected the Erie Canal at Schenectady to Albany in 1831 and tied together their respective rivers). Today thanks to a potential investment of federal money, look for the next state of the art travel mode: high-speed passenger rail service.
Our government has a long history of under-funding Amtrak , so one may ask what could Amtrak become if high-speed passenger rail service were adequately funded and developed? We are now at the start of a multi-year process to develop high-speed rail. Can we find the can-do spirit of Ingenuity to do for our future what DeWitt Clinton did for commerce and the growth of New York State? And we need strong, focused leaders to make this happen. Political will is a must to move this country forward in high-speed rail, even to match what other countries have done in the field.
You may wonder if high-speed rail works? The answer is a resounding yes. Japan’s bullet trains have enviable performance records. France has been enjoying high-speed rail for 40 years. Today, according to a TRAINS MAGAZINE article about the French high-speed train known as the TGV, there are over 438 high-speed train sets in daily service. Each set consists of 8 to 12 cars. In contrast, Amtrak, our national rail company, has a national fleet totaling 1435 rail cars for the entire country.
To begin to remedy this situation on a local level, the federal government has allocated stimulus money for Phase One of a project to bring high-speed rail to Vermont. The stimulus provides eight billion dollars to get us started. Vermont, wanting to take a progressive stance, has received approval for two rail projects. Our rail projects are a high priority, according to Rex Burke, Director of the Bennington County Regional Planning Commission (BCRC). Rex recently attended the Northeast Rail Summit in Springfield, Mass. According to him, Vermont is to have rail passenger corridors on both sides of Vermont. Immediate investment in 2011 is required for the “Vermonter Line,” and more long-range grants encompass a Western corridor from Burlington, VT to Albany. The Western corridor line will pass through Bennington County. The Vermont Agency of Transportation (AOT) will select a consultant by late November-early December, to manage the local grant for southwestern Vermont’s rail corridor. The selection committee reports to the AOT and includes representatives such as Rex Burke. Once selected, the consultant will conduct a comprehensive study. It will also assess community interest in high-speed rail connections. This will be a multi-year project. In Southwestern Vermont, the Southwestern Vermont Rail Corridor Committee (SVRCC) with representatives from the Manchester and Bennington area Chambers of Commerce and other community members, will be pushing for progress. Future articles from our group will provide detailed Information on various aspects of the project.
The questions we have to answer are, as did Jefferson in 1806, “Does this project define us as to our will today or is it to be executed a century hence?” Like DeWitt Clinton, do we have the will to take on this project and see It through to the end, defying constraints, to get high-speed passenger rail service put right here, where our communities, businesses, and residents can begin to benefit from It?
George E. Lerrigo is a resident of North Bennington and a founding member of the Southwestern Vermont Railroad Committee (SVRRC)
