At an event at Springfield's Union Station, Congressman Richard Neal and MassDOT representatives gave an update on the progress and status of the West East Rail project. West East Rail is part of Compass Rail which according to the Commonwealth has a goal of "expanding passenger rail service and improving connectivity across Massachusetts."

At today's event Congressman Richard Neal announced an additional $1.2 million grant for the project. MassDOT Rail and Transit Administrator Meredith Slesinger said the grant will go towards federally required safety equipment, "One of the limitations that we've had so far on our Compass Rail program is that we are capped in the amount of service that we can run north of Springfield on the Knowledge Corridor. That is because we need to install Positive Train Control (PTC), a federally mandated safety technology. So this earmark will help us continue the planning and design of that effort because we don't just want to go west-east, we also need to add more trains north and south. We've seen where we've had ridership since 2018 double on that corridor and we think it can continue to grow."

Andy Koziol, West-East Rail Director said West East Rail is a complicated, multi-layered project, "Everything that we do, all of our products, they're building upon each other. We're telling a story where it's not a bunch of one-off, discrete projects, but each one builds upon each other to get to our full build-out vision for 2045. So it's all about creating that bigger vision for service."

While many parts of the overall West East Rail project are years away from completion, there is an area where progress will be happening soon, "The most notable new Compass Rail project that we have right now is that $108 million federal grant for the Inland Route. So we have that funding available to build track capacity in between Worcester and Springfield that will allow us to run two round trips per day and that is really the first tangible West East Rail that we're going to see here in the Commonwealth and right now we're in design we have a lot of those aspects of those, like there's a lot of sub projects built into that. They're in design now and we're going to go into construction in 2027 with new service starting in 2030."