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How We're Tracking Amtrak Corridor ID With Technology

Technology allows us to be always in the know on Corridor ID grants and progress of the FRA on Ohio routes.

Technology allows us to be always in the know on Corridor ID grants and progress of the FRA on Ohio routes.

December 28, 2024

Ryan Pecaut

Corridor ID is the national grant program from the Federal Railroad Administration for new passenger rail development in America. It's broken up into multiple steps.

  • Step 1 - Scoping: This initial phase involves identifying potential corridors for development and conducting preliminary assessments.

  • Step 2 - Service Development Plan: In this phase, detailed plans are created for the selected corridors, including scope, schedule, and cost estimates.

  • Step 3 - Preliminary Engineering: This phase focuses on the planning and engineering required to bring the project to the construction-ready stage.

  • Implementation


In Ohio, four routes received step 1 grants, and are now working on receiving their step 2 grants. Step 2 grants are expected in early to mid 2025 but the timings can be unpredictable. This led to a clear need: how will we know when things are in action or when we need to encourage our government agencies to take actions.


We've turned to our team to develop tech that lets us track Corridor ID grant funding and generate summaries of the activities going on to send to our team. A pretty basic web scraping engine checks federal sites for signs of Corridor ID funding - when a funding grant is identified as in progress, we get an email to our inboxes using google apps script.


A flow chart with four boxes. 1. Corridor ID Watch Tool. 2. AI Context Generator. 3. News Cataloger. 4) allaboardohio.org including x, instragram, threads, blog, RSS feed, and bluesky

Second - an automated report is kicked off - which uses Google Gemini AI to collect data, detailed information, and links to sources into a report with details about the expected funding announcement. This lets us react faster with information sent directly to our inbox.


Third - we use google alerts to collect relevant news stories and with code automatically copy the alerts into a google spreadsheet and categorize news stories to make finding references easy.


The whole goal is to have all the information we need - at our fingertips - effortlessly. We do this for every Corridor ID route, but we have specific interests in the below routes for Ohio:


Routes we're keeping an eye on:


Support Us

We may be Ohio's largest transit advocacy nonprofit but we need your support. Learn more and donate:

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Ryan Pecaut

Ryan Pecaut is the Communications Strategy Lead at All Aboard Ohio

Our Mission

We advocate for better transit and passenger rail throughout the Midwest. Your support helps us.

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ABOUT ALL ABOARD OHIO
All Aboard Ohio is a non-profit, member-based organization dedicated to promoting improved public transportation and passenger rail service throughout the state. 

Founded in 1973 and incorporated as a registered 501c-3 in 1987, All Aboard Ohio has spent more than 50 years advocating, educating, and working towards our goal of a connected Midwest

All Aboard Ohio is a 501c-3 nonprofit with over 50 years of advocacy work, advocating for improved public transportation and passenger rail service in the Midwest

©2025 by All Aboard Ohio

Get in Touch

Contact us form

info@allaboardohio.org

3136 Kingsdale Center, 


#112 Columbus, OH 43221

Federal Tax ID: 31-1066182

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All Aboard Ohio is a 501c-3 nonprofit with over 50 years of advocacy work, advocating for improved public transportation and passenger rail service in the Midwest

Cleveland Tower Photo by cmh2315fl on Flickr (CC)

©2025 by All Aboard Ohio

Get in Touch

Contact us form

info@allaboardohio.org

3136 Kingsdale Center, 


#112 Columbus, OH 43221

Federal Tax ID: 31-1066182

  • Instagram
  • Bluesky
  • Threads
  • Youtube
  • Facebook
  • X
  • LinkedIn
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