Rail service topped the list of the 2022 Economic Outlook Summit sponsored by East Stroudsburg University.

Dennis Newman, the executive vice president for Strategy, Planning and Accessibility for Amtrak, was the keynote speaker recently at Kalahari Resorts and Conventions in Pocono Manor. The theme of the summit was The Poconos: Innovation and Opportunity.

In January, Amtrak announced its intent to expand its lines. The company is looking at three possible connection lines: Scranton to New York City, Allentown to NYC, and Reading to Philadelphia to NYC.

“Each of these services has the opportunity to bring great economic impact,” Newman said.

Amtrak already has a line that runs across the state from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg and on to Philadelphia.

Amtrak’s plan for the Scranton connection would offer three round trips per day with stops in the Poconos and New Jersey. The company estimates the new line would generate $87 million in annual economic activity, plus $2.9 billion from one-time investments along the corridor.

Through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in November 2021, Amtrak will get $22 billion of the $66 billion allotted for rail service.

The Federal Railroad Administration will receive $8 billion for rail and safety, and the FRA’s Passenger Rail Division will receive $36 billion, of which $24 billion is slated for the northeast corridor, Newman said. Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor line runs from Washington, D.C., to Boston.

Since Amtrak began in 1971, the number of route miles it ran reached a peak around 1980, and has dropped back to about where it began. Today, it runs on 21,400 route miles. Competition with cars and air travel has sapped travelers from the train market, but the market has changed, and the company thinks this is the time to expand, Newman said.

Amtrak drafted a plan called ConnectsUS that includes several possible areas of development across the country. Newman said the company analyzed areas it thinks it can be competitive.

“The Northeast by itself is just a massive population center,” he said.

At the most basic level, Amtrak is considering areas where there are two population centers that are not too far apart.

“It gives you a metric to indicate where there is potential,” he said.

Newman thinks the Scranton to NYC corridor fits the metric with 1.3 million people in NYC and about 1 million in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area, and a distance as the crow flies of about 100 miles.

“That’s a pretty good recipe for a service that could be effective,” he said.

Newman said that from there Amtrak looked at which ones nationwide had schedules originally, and the cost to invest in redeveloping a passenger line.

The one thing the Poconos has going for it is years of planning, so it would be ready once the opportunity presented itself.

The Pennsylvania Northeast Regional Railroad Authority has been securing land, business agreements and funds for years to make the passenger rail expansion a possibility.

“There’s a whole bunch of work that’s already been done,” Newman said. “Folks I’ve been talking to have been working on this for decades and trying to bring this service to pass. We really are standing on the shoulders of a whole bunch of people who have done a lot of good work to identify this opportunity and help it move forward.”

Now, Amtrak is working on engineering, developing a service plan, determine how much capital is needed, as well as the cost of infrastructure investments, and working with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and New Jersey Transit.

In January, Raymond Lang, the vice president of state supported services business development for Amtrak, said at a conference at the Stroudsmoor Country Inn in Stroudsburg that Amtrak has contracted with PNRRA to do a $400,000 study to determine ridership levels, revenue and high-level infrastructure costs associated with starting the service. The study should be completed by August.

According to the PNRRA’s website, an active rail right of way runs from Scranton through Tobyhanna, Pocono Mountain, Analomink and East Stroudsburg to Delaware Water Gap. The New Jersey Rail Service operates a line that starts near Mount Arlington splits and goes to NYC and Hoboken. The space between the two end points is an abandoned rail right of way.

The website states that the feasibility, environmental and preliminary engineering have all been completed for the Scranton to New York City Rail Restoration Project, and more than $10 million in state and federal funding has been invested in the project, so far.