CLEVELAND — A walk up to Amtrak's Cleveland station on any given day will likely lead you to a locked fence. The station is only open most days from midnight to 7:30 a.m. because of the stops that occur during the middle of the night.
"It’s sad," NOACA Executive Director & CEO Grace Gallucci said. "I love we have service so we should be grateful. But it’s really not acceptable to have it only in those nighttime hours. We have great ridership in the middle of the night. Could you imagine the ridership we could have in the daytime?"
The nonprofit agency NOACA, which stands for The Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, hosted All Aboard Ohio Thursday to help highlight what an expansion of Amtrak options could look like across the state.
While the stops are nowhere near finalized, the proposal would add three new routes, including connecting Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati by rail for the first time since 1967 with the 3C+D corridor.
That could include stops at Cleveland Hopkins Airport and Crestline, which sits on the line of Richland County.
This initial economic pointed to an initial impact of $107 million for the state of Ohio if more routes and stops were added.
"It’s going to help us bring businesses to the state," All Aboard Ohio Chair Erin Rosiello said. "They want workforce mobility. We have all those big cities across the state, and this is an opportunity for us to link all those cities for personal reasons, too, including medical care and visits."
Right now, Amtrak makes stops in Cleveland as part of routes that connect New York City and Boston to Chicago, as well as Washington D.C. to Chicago. Those routes typically involve a very early morning departure and arrival in Cleveland.
For Jerry Bohinc and Raj Aggarwal, the two stopped in hoping to see this plan reach even further, with the possibility of making it “high speed” rail, cutting down on travel time and enabling commuters to utilize the option.
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"The phrase is it's too far to drive and too close to fly," Bohinc explained. "There’s the middle space that the Midwest is ideal for. If you can get train service which is technically available, you could get commuter time between cities and the cities all of a sudden become one city, a metroplex. You could do it everyday if you had the right kind of train service."
As part of this expansion, Amtrak has also said it is looking at rail expansion to include more daily round-trip options for Cleveland to places such as Detroit and New York City.
Organizers point out it’s all still very much in the early planning phase, and more studies will required with local support and funds still needed to make this a reality.
