Coalition members in good standing are invited to attend CRC’s spring board meeting, March 12 & 13, in Santa Fe, NM.

The Drury Plaza Hotel, just steps from the Santa Fe Plaza, will be the location of our welcome reception on March 12, and the CRC board meeting on Friday, March 13.

When making your travel arrangements, please plan to stay for Friday afternoon’s technical tour to experience the NM Rail Runner Express. We will take a short motorcoach ride from the hotel to the NM 599 Station and enjoy a trip through the high desert back into Santa Fe to the Santa Fe Depot and Railyard.

Pause to shop or enjoy a beverage or two from the Railyard as you walk back to the hotel through the Historic Santa Fe Plaza. Stay until Saturday and enjoy one of the nation’s top farmer’s markets at the Railyard.

Attendees are requested to RSVP here. Hotel reservations can be made directly on the Drury Hotel’s website with group number 10170867, or at 1-800-325-0720 referencing the same group number.

Room rates are $167/night, including daily breakfast and happy hour, with reduced rate parking of $22 overnight or $12 daily.

• STB Ruling: The STB ruled last Friday, Jan. 16, the UP-NS application was “incomplete” following pushback on the application from BNSF, CN, and others. This ruling means UP-NS will simply need to add more information and not that there’s anything fatally wrong with the application. UP confirmed it will re-file an amended application. Another 30-day clock will start for the STB to determine if the application is “complete.” And if deemed “complete” then a 45-day clock for public comments.

• FY26 THUD Appropriations: Bicameral, bipartisan text of the FY2026 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations bill was released Jan. 20. This bill is four months late into the fiscal year which began Oct. 1 and would fund full-year FTA formula apportionments, plus set funding amounts for DOT grant programs for which commuter rail is eligible. Since FTA has not issued a partial-year FTA formula apportionment yet, BRGR assumes they will now issue a full-year apportionment, perhaps late February or in March. The bill appropriates $976 million more than the continuing resolution did for DOT discretionary programs. The bill transfers $2.325 billion from IIJA Division J programs (“Advanced Appropriations”) to existing DOT programs. Of note, the bill includes $1.7 billion for Capital Investment Grants in addition to allocating $1.6 billion in Advanced Appropriations, for a total of $3.673 billion. While this is roughly $500 million less than FTA’s request, this cut is less than was feared for the politically vulnerable CIG program and would allow initial funding installments for several new CIG projects to be made in 2026.

• Small bill mark-ups in T&I: The House T&I committee on Jan. 21 marked up several smaller bills, including bills related to military air traffic controllers, aerial wildfire response, and pilot certificates. CRC will be angling to get its passenger rail liability bill included in future batches of bills to be marked up in the T&I and Senate Commerce Committees, as well as pushing for CRC legislation in the larger surface transportation authorization bill and in the fiscal year 2027 appropriations process. The House T&I Committee has hinted at possible February hearings on surface transportation authorization and the FY27 appropriations process will ramp up in late January through February. Deadlines will likely start mid-February for Members to receive requests, and then deadlines for Members to submit requests to the Appropriations Committee.

• Per Jeff Davis/ENO | The Trump Administration requested nearly $27.1 billion in new appropriations for program spending at USDOT, but this was to be offset by repealing $4.1 billion in advance appropriations from the IIJA infrastructure law and another $1.6 billion in contract authority from that same law. There are longstanding budget rules against both of those types of rescissions being used to offset new appropriations. The final bill only provides $24.0 billion in new appropriations for program spending, but it does so without any gimmicks. On top of that, the bill transfers $2.3 billion from IIJA accounts to accounts in the bill, because transferring money is allowed under the accounting rules while repealing emergency advances to offset new money is not. The result is $26.4 billion in program spending, about $700 million below the budget request. The final bill also includes almost $2.4 billion in earmarked projects for legislators which were not requested by the Administration.

  The only large offset in the final bill was made possible by the State of California dropping its lawsuit over its withheld high-speed rail money right before Christmas. Section 156(9) of the bill repeals $928.6 million in high-speed rail funding appropriated seventeen years ago and formally awarded in November 2011 but never spent.

  The final bill makes available a total of $2.9 billion in gross funding for the Federal Railroad Administration, $170 million of which is not actually new money but is transferred from similar accounts in Division J of the IIJA. A large chunk of this is offset by $950 million in rescissions of old balances, most of which is the aforementioned rescission of that 17-year-old California high-speed rail money. (Money almost old enough to vote.) Amtrak receives a total of $2.427 billion, the same amount as last year and as in the budget request. However, the bill goes along with the Administration request to shift $290 million from the Northeast Corridor to the National Network within the overall total, so the final amounts are $850 million for the NEC and $1.577 billion for the NN. The Amtrak money has the usual set-asides ($5 million for the NEC Commission, $3 million for the State-Supported Route Committee, plus a new set-aside of $5 million towards a “new intercity passenger rail hub in downtown Atlanta.” Up to $66 million in NN money can be used for corridor development activities.

  The bill provides $137.4 million for new CRISI grants, of which $87.4 million is earmarked for special projects for legislators and the remaining $50 million is for competitive grants. In addition to the $7.2 billion for the Federal-State Partnership program made available in the final year of the IIJA from its advance appropriations, the bill adds an additional $20 million (plus $40 million transferred from the DOT oversight office to the program), mostly so they can dedicate $5 million of that amount towards rehabilitation of the Washington D.C. Union Station. The bill appropriates $264.8 million for FRA Safety and Operations, and $40 million for railroad R&D (of which $2 million is set aside “to establish and maintain a center of excellence” for railroad R&D activities.

Law360 recently looked back on Phil Murphy’s time leading the Garden State, including this excerpt on his promise to NJ Transit.

“When he took office in 2018, (former NJ Governor Phil) Murphy said he would fix NJ Transit if it killed him. (In a recent interview) he said this week that attempting to do so has yet to kill him, he did admit that "it is an undertaking that will outlast my time as governor."

“His administration was, however, able to take a big step in addressing the mass transit agency's needs. In June 2024, the state Legislature passed a number of bills in conjunction with New Jersey's $56.6 billion fiscal year 2025 spending plan that brought back a 2.5% tax surcharge on large businesses with more than $10 million in allocated taxable net income that will expire at the end of 2028.

“Dubbed a transit fee, the almost $1 billion in annual revenue the tax is expected to generate is planned to be earmarked for NJ Transit beginning this year. The revenue, however, is not protected — a fact pointed out by critics — and the tax gives New Jersey the highest corporate income tax rate of any state.

“It's also a drop in the bucket when looking at the transit agency's total needs.

"It's a math problem that seems to be impossible to solve given the needs of the agency," Artiles said. "It just requires so much more that no one governor can truly solve it unless we suddenly come into all this money."

Read more HERE.

FRA this week shared a summary of the current status of the Dispatchers and Signal Employees Certification Rules.

Dispatcher/Signal Certification Rules – Current Status:

• On May 24, 2024, FRA published the final rules for Signal Employees and Dispatchers Certification. FRA received multiple petitions for reconsideration regarding these final rules. On January 17, 2025, FRA responded to AAR, APTA, ASLRRA and CRC petitions, granting APTA’s petition in full and the other petitions in part.

• In a letter dated March 15, 2025, FRA informed AAR, APTA, ASLRRA, and CRC that, consistent with EO 14219, FRA is reviewing issues raised by the Dispatcher and Signal Employees Certification final rules consistent with petitions for reconsideration previously submitted and that FRA will engage in a rulemaking to extend the compliance dates in the rules. In that letter, FRA also indicated that during this review and during the pendency of the rulemaking, FRA will exercise its enforcement discretion and will not take enforcement action based on the current deadlines in §§ 245.103(a), 245.105(c)-(e), 246.103(a) and 246.105(c)-(e), nor will FRA disapprove a railroad’s program because it did not meet the current deadlines. FRA’s position has not changed, and FRA will continue to exercise enforcement discretion with respect to the rules’ existing compliance deadlines until completion of the intended additional rulemaking referenced in FRA’s March 15, 2025, letter.

FRA will continue to work with the industry providing any requested technical assistance.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• Senators Introduce Passenger Rail Crew Protection Act (Railway Age)

• TX: As North Texas cities near deadline to cancel DART exit votes, can they find compromise? (Mass Transit)

• Fiscal 2026 Rail Money Bill: Could Be Much Worse (Rail Passengers Association)

• Plan scrapped to expand Metrolink service to Santa Barbara (Trains Pro)

• MBTA Communities Act Holdouts Are Losing State Funding (Streets Blog Mass)

• Congress advances transportation funding bill (Smart Cities Dive)

  … AND WATCHING

• Chicago's Massive Bet on Regional Rail (Heartland Urbanist YouTube)