Getting on Track

With a state report pending, Memphis and other cities submit proposal for passenger rail line.

Passenger rail planning in Tennessee surfaced brie y last week in a Congressional hearing with Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner with a bit of recent news regarding Memphis.

A Saturday-morning power-washing erased the hate at Cooper-Young’s Rainbow Crosswalk last weekend. A hateful someone scrawled a hateful word on the street in white spray paint. e act was all over the MEMernet and local television broadcasts. Jerred Price, the principal mover to get the crosswalks installed, and others washed the word away.

“But this small act of hate was trumped with the outpour of love today from all those who helped clean it up,” Price wrote on Facebook. “ ank you [Memphis Police Department] for your help and investigation into this as well as to all those who helped clean this mess up.”

Tiny Bombed

Sarah Galyean put beer — Wiseacre’s Tiny Bomb, to be speci c — in her hair. e TikToker was testing a conditioning method used by Catherine Zeta-Jones, mixing beer with honey.

e two-part post had Galyean joking as she mixed the ingredients in a NutriBullet before pouring the mix in her hair in the shower. Verdict?

“Does my hair smell like the oor of a Dave & Buster’s? Yes,” she said. But, “this is the rst celebrity beauty secret I might actually do a second time because it really does work. I’m shook.”

Ja 2k24

Not o cial or anything. But who are we to argue?

In a previous story, the Flyer described e orts underway by a state group to deliver a passenger rail plan to legislators and other state o cials next month. e Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (TACIR) has been working on a rail plan since 2022, when the Tennessee General Assembly passed a bill requesting one.

While TACIR works to meet the July deadline, several Tennessee cities led an application with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) for grant money to help them begin to plan for a possible rail route for passengers.

In March, Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly announced that his city had teamed up with Atlanta, Nashville, and Memphis in the submission that could draw $500,000 in planning funds for a route that would connect those cities.

at application surfaced in a hearing last week of the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Memphis) asked Amtrak’s Gardner about passenger rail movement in the state. Gardner said the corridor “holds a lot of promise.”

Bus service from Memphis to Nashville has been around awhile, o ered by many di erent companies. A one-way Greyhound ticket costs $42 (on a recent search) and takes about three hours and 45 minutes. FlixBus and Megabus run the route, too. BizBus began o ering the route last month in a service that promised comfortable seating, Wi-Fi, and an onboard attendant for about $50.

“I have heard a great amount of support [for a passenger rail] in Memphis and Nashville,” Cohen said during last Tuesday’s hearing. “People in Memphis want to go to Nashville, the state capital, for all kinds of reasons. And people in Nashville have even more reasons to leave and come to Memphis. So, there’s this great synergy of energy there.”

He said the application is a “ rst critical step” in the passenger rail planning process. If nothing else, it simply gets the state and the cities into the federal system, to stand in line and be ready for funds when they become available.

Cohen said a rail line between Nashville and Memphis is more important now that Ford Motor Co. is building BlueOval City in Haywood County, just a few miles east of Memphis between the city and Nashville.

Also, Cohen said the “area’s not served by air transportation, commercial air.” No direct ights exist from Memphis International Airport to Nashville International Airport. Spirit Airlines will get you there with an 11-hour layover in Orlando (for $211), according to a search at Kayak. Delta Airlines will deliver Memphians to Nashville in just over three hours with a stop in Atlanta for $359, also according to Kayak.

While state o cials await TACIR’s report, they have signaled their support to the feds of passenger rail in Tennessee. Howard “Butch” Eley, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT), has given that support in two letters to the FRA.

“Addressing growing transportation congestion in Tennessee’s major urban areas and along major commuting and commerce routes throughout our state is of paramount importance to [TDOT] as we work to meet the state’s growth, prosperity, and mobility needs,” Eley wrote to the FRA in March. “We believe Tennessee is an important state in the national discussion of long-distance passenger rail service.

“Between 2010 and 2020, Tennessee grew by nearly 600,000 people and our state continues to be a leader in job growth and economic development. Tennessee is also a major tourist destination and visitors to our state come to all parts of our state to experience our rich culture of music and entertainment as well as our natural and scenic beauty.”