No one is removing rails from any of these towns to Oklahoma City. Let's be realistic here. We're talking about removing SOME existing rails for what amounts to several city blocks.

I have yet to see any ridership studies or offers of financial contributions from any of these towns. Shawnee wants people from Oklahoma City to ride the train to their casinos, according to the article I saw. That should be a good reason for them to offer a significant amount of money to help finance the rail line, no?

Kerry sez: ...and all of those towns added together are half the population of OKC proper. So I think "small town" is an acurate description.
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...and your point is?

Truth is truth no matter where it comes from. Similarly, "ignorance."

AS with ODOT and unfortunate past OKC leadership, the parameters of the argument conveniently and quite arbitrarily "change" to elude the counter arguments.

The 20-Year Plan Update Transportation Working Group was told, "Oklahoma City really has no part in the Crosstown -- it's a FEDERAL PROJECT on a federal corridor." Of course, that simply was not true -- but it gave "certain folks" what they felt to be plausible deniability.

Now, ODOT and certain OKC interests insist it was "really an Oklahoma City project all the time" -- so what are cities "20 miles from downtown" doing trying to intervene?

Which is it?

TOM ELMORE

Tom - I was a city planner in Florida and I can tell you for a fact that municipal jurisdictions have very little say in state and federal projects. Granted I didn't work for a city the size of OKC but I was a member of the Metropolitan Panning Organization for an area with a population of 3X metro OKC. When the state wanted to expand a state road through our community from a 2 lane road to an 8 lane mega road they didn't ask us crap about it. They only told us where the road was going to go and where we had move city owned utilities.

We even asked that a new stop light be put in near a new Wal-Mart Supercenter. Wal-Mart even offered to pay for the light. The state said no and 10 years later there is still not la ight at that intersection.

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Oklahoma City - The surprise your family has been looking for.

"Can't never did do nothin'," my grandmother used to say.

Truer words were never spoken.

There's no excuse for a plan to destroy the state's rail center. No argument can be made for it.

God help me, I, for one, will continue to fight for it. Others can do as they will.

TOM ELMORE

I can think of 4...

I'm going to fight for Oklahoma City myself, and what I think it needs. Rail is only one piece of a huge puzzle, and if it's not done right, it destroys the rest. As I said, make Union Station a commercial freight hub and you've ruined one of the more beautiful old buildings we have, as well as Core to Shore. Plan mass transit poorly, and you've not only ruined an opportunity to get people out of their cars, but you've wasted billions of dollars.

Earth to Tom: Union Station is not the state's rail center. It might have played a role 60 years ago, but not today. You showed up for the battle 60 years too late. Individual transportation won.

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Oklahoma City - The surprise your family has been looking for.

I don't want big trains crisscrossing downtown. Who wants to go to a park and hear the roar of a train engine?

Just because Union Station will not be used as a railhub does not mean another can't be built elsewhere.

A FREAKING MEN ssandedoc

I think people that run the railroads ought to decide where railyards should be. To my knowledge no one who works for a railroad has suggested that Union Station be turned into anything other than what it is now, office/storage.

Tom thinks non-impacted municipal governments should determine the location of railyards despite what the railroads want.

Tell us again Tom how your way of thinking is better.

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Oklahoma City - The surprise your family has been looking for.

If, as you claim, you've been involved in city planning on an official level somewhere, you know better.

Which "railroad" was it, again, that uses OKC Union Station for offices and storage?

Which "railroad" operates DART Rail? And Rail Runner Express? And all the other new regional rail transit systems around the nation?

Why did the commercial railroad companies get out of passenger service? Could it have had anything to do with the politically-driven, arbitrary removal of the sustaining US Mail contracts? And roughly two-thirds of the floor space at the OKC Union Station terminal building is -- what? Mail and Express handling facility.

Why throw a lot of BS in the air -- when you know better?

Maybe you "don't know better?"

Maybe filling the air with nonsense is your mission?

And as to the commercial railroad companies -- what are they doing for you here in OKC lately? Blocking arterial street crossings hour-to-hour all over the metro. One local business has a constantly repeated slogan about its location on all its radio commercials - "where there's always a train when you're in a hurry..."

That's more and more the case as there are more and more trains. So why would leaders in their right minds be eliminating underpasses and overpasses instead of taking a crash course to build as many more as possible? Maybe because we have a governor who apparently believes "nothing has changed over the last seven years?"

Why would BNSF, already awash in liability exposure because of its many at-grade highway-rail crossings, willingly trade the highest quality east-west corridor with longstanding underpasses at Robinson and Walker for exclusively at-grade rail crossings? Because it won't be operating that line. It doesn't care. The business it does in Oklahoma City doesn't really make a flyspeck on its annual-revenue windshield -- and it's apparently not interested in growing existing business. So who gets stuck with the problem of another place where "there's always a train when you're in a hurry?"

You do. Your kids do. Your relatives, friends and neighbors do.

But, I'm sure that doesn't bother a sincere fellow like you -- just as long as "the people who run the railroads made the decision."

Right?

TOM ELMORE

There, you said it yourself......Union Station is obsolete.

None of the commercial railroad companies have any plans to return to the passenger rail business and the U.S. postal service has no desire or plan to ever use it as a postal facility again.....in fact they closed the downtown postal facility across the street from it and sold the property.

Union Station went belly up over 40 years ago for a reason and that reason has not changed.

Nope. I didn't say such a thing.

You said it.

But, then -- you don't actually know anything about the subject, do you?

TOM ELMORE

I know the Four Undeniable Facts

Fact 1 - Union Station is not currently used as a train station.
Fact 2 - There is not a plan by anyone to use Union Station as a train station.
Fact 3 - The 2 existing active rail lines passing by Union Station will not be removed.
Fact 4 - Union Station will not be torn down.

I also know that the postal facility across from Union Station was closed and the property was sold and there are no future plans to use Union Station as a postal facilty.

I know that as a taxpayer that I want the the new I-40 crosstown finished as planned.

I know that at this point I don't want one penny of MY tax dollars spent on commuter rail to El Reno or Shawnee.

I know that I have read every word of every one of your posts in this thread and I remain wholey and totally unswayed by your opinions on the matter.

This is getting even more ridiculous. To say that none of know what we are talking about is absurd, I'm a resident and taxpayer of Oklahoma City. It's Oklahoma City residents plus visitors who would be using the proposed Union Station and rail system. Most of the people who are on this forum are active citizens who like to know what's going on in downtown.

None of us have to have a degree in engineering or city planning to understand that Union Station as a railroad hub is not feasible.

Why?

Because it sits eight blocks away from the business district. Because there's not a metro rail system in place for ridership population. Most people drive and do not take the metro. No one wants trains running and steaming through our central park. I-40 needs to be built now for safety reasons. We can't financially or for safety afford any delays.

But again, this will get glossed over by you Tom. Please accept there's a counterpoint to you. It's not going to kill you. I applaud your efforts and research, but the citizens have spoken.

all this talk of union station, well I remember the sante fe depot sat empty being vandalized for years and squatted by homeless people.. what if they just yanked the tracks out, Amtrak wouldn't have it open again. While other City's are moving back to light rail, we are moving away from it or not?

Union Station has no bearing on whether we are moving towards or away from light rail.

Read the entire thread.

Im reading, the thread is huge I think it would be good to use Union Station as part of it. Bricktown was so popular because it was 'old'. And now its help revitalize all of downtown. Not everything should be new. But I will not comment again until I catch up, cheers.

I didn't own a car for over 10 years of my adult life. I lived in big cities and rode mass transit every single day. I think that qualifies me to give my opinion about what I think will work and what won't. I may not be an engineer, but I'm something as, if not more important....I'm a customer. Ask the customer what they want, and you're more likely to get them to buy and use your product.

No matter what we say, Tom has no regard for compromise or differing opinions. I was willing to consider the station's use, but Tom isn't willing to consider it's non-use. Their tired arguements are losing steam and we will soon see I-40 roll right over them with little fuss. We can all rest assure that I-40 will be right where it's supposed to be and we will be able to forget any of this tired crap ever happened.

route66girl - Union Station and the 2 active lines behind it are not going away. In fact, I would like to see Union Station as a stop on some kind of rail line. However, that is not what Tom and his group wants. He wants to turn the area around Union Station into the largest intermodal working freight yard in the Southwest complete with gantry cranes, 24/7 semi-trucks, shipping containers, and maintenance equipment. Keep in mind that Tom does not work for a railroad, but he did stay at Holiday Inn Express.

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Oklahoma City - The surprise your family has been looking for.

route66gal,

I want to make union station the 'everything' hub of okc...but, after drawing up my own figures and factoring in how terribly behind Oklahoma is on transit, there is no way in the world union station could handle all of that influx of traffic--on rail alone--not figuring bus parking...automobile drop-off/pickup parking, etc... the plan that I have put together actually uses Union Station as one of many inner-loop substations, which would make good use of the two tracks...who knows, maybe that's what they were thinking with the two tracks as well. If they wanted to make it 100% unusable, wouldn't they take away all the tracks and remove all bridges over that way?


As it sits now, they are not destroying Union Station and in fact, as others have stated, they are leaving a couple of lines there for potential future use.

In the big picture, Oklahoma has kept the issue silent, hoping the growing transit problem would somehow go away if they just kept it off the drawing board. One can't even imagine how quickly the walls of that station would bust at the seams if we had even a halfway decent system. Even if they were to ditch C2S altogether and give the entire area to Union Station, it would have to be expanded and modified as ridership caught on.

It is an awesome facility and way cool looking. The station will be saved in the process and rail....I mean, come on people, rail is replaceable and cheap for the most part...and that rail layout all over downtown is the work of a madman...look at the layout...looks like someone was going to build a death ride for a horror movie!

Dont assume that I'm all for the project though. I'm not onboard with the choice they made on the location of the new I-40, and I question whether they can do C2S in the next 100 years, before it goes out of style! If they would add a few more "S" turns and some more overly-tight on/off-ramps I think it would be right in-line with they typically come up with here.

Okay guys thanks for clearing up your thoughts on it

I just love Union Station, I once rented an old house that was said have been the architects personal residence he built while working on it. It was a great house, lost of the same character but scaled down... I dont know if the story of the builder was true but the fireplace and the tile colors are a match, along with the Mission Art Deco Style, light fixtures and such. And part of the old rail ran right by it in its yard..

Yeah, no doubt it's a cool-looking place...I would at least like to see it tied into the transit system.