Northeast Corridor

With planes stuck on runways and ramps, repair teams rush to repair the links.

They're trying to sterilize the airspace in the entire Northeast Corridor just to make sure it doesn't cause issues for aircraft that are in the air.

We're using old architecture, 30-, 40-year-old architecture.

We have asked the Congress to do a whole new architecture

You talked about footprint.

And with the way that the PGA Tour is going and a lot of people focusing on the Northeast Corridor, Philly and New York and Boston, how about you in terms of the idea of how important Chicago is, whether it be to annualize as the Western Open used to be and now the WGA through the BMW, and I think effectively has used all these different markets.

Do you think it's really important that the tour be in Chicago every year?

Yes, not just because of the size of the city and bias being a guy who grew up in the Chicago area and off and on has lived here for parts of my life, adult life.

Many people think of trains as electrically powered and some passenger rail services are.

Amtrak's Acela trains, for example, operate on the electrified Northeast Corridor.

But many other American passenger routes use diesel-electric locomotives.

Amtrak continues to introduce new diesel locomotives for its long-distance services, including routes that span thousands of miles.

The one that I'm talking about is actually what connects the northern and southern legs.

Specifically, it runs between Trenton, New Jersey, which is the southern end of the northeast corridor branch of NJT and also the northern end of the Trenton branch of SEPTA, and the Atlantic City line, which is the sole commuter regional rail line in southern New Jersey that runs from Philadelphia 30th Street Station all the way to, obviously, Atlantic City.

And interestingly, this does run parallel to the northeast corridor on the other side of the Delaware River.

In fact, I do believe this is actually on the same trackage as the Camden and Amboy, which was in the 1830s I think the first railroad in the United States to have regularly published passenger service.

Anyway, the River Line itself was opened in March 2004 as the first DMU in the United States and the second in North America.

On the southern end, the River Line connects to Philadelphia by way of a transfer with PATCO, which I believe was the first fully automated metro in the United States.

And this gives it a connection into, of course, downtown Philadelphia, making it more convenient than just ending short of downtown.

On the other end, the DMU actually connects with the Northeast Corridor itself, Amtrak trains.

And these companies can often range from some of the larger players, but you'll often find a significant number of them that are $10 to $30 million in revenue providing very niche components into the ground systems.

And in particular, for this audience, the Northeast Corridor has anchored much of the supply base and private capital is actively investing in the area.

Think about CPI and its composite structures has been backed by private equity, the Jordan Company.

Outpost Mission Services.

This is a service provider that installs and does maintenance on radomes that was acquired by Washington Harbor Partners just this year.

and others that just kind of populate that Northeast corridor in some key areas, such as State College, parts of New Hampshire and Portsmouth.

So I think as you're thinking about the entire space value chain, we have these really heavy capital intensive, very heavy venture backed launchers that are very expensive, but then also some of these critical players that are in the component space, particularly around the ground systems.

So that was it, just wanted to set the tone.

However, over half of people in the United States live in that, say, 5%.

And so people are feeling the high, like a majority of people are feeling the high prices because so many of them live in these constrained places, whether that's L.A. or parts of California or the Northeast Corridor.

Do you guys have any thoughts about that in terms of, like, yes, the expensive places are concentrated geographically, but they're also concentrated demographically.

And so it's still a really big problem for huge numbers of people.