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.

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:

• 3C&D - Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, Cleveland

• Daily Cardinal Service

• Midwest Connect

• Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland