The assessment includes information about $3,620,552 that would be used for interior and exterior renovations for the Battle Creek station, which has not had major renovations for about 20 years. Renovations would create a more modern and user-friendly facility.

Modifications to mechanical, electrical, plumbing, security and technology are included in the plan. The assessment also looks at the potential impact of high-speed rail and details actions taken to minimize harm to the environment.

Changes to the rail system will not detract from the human, physical or biological environment, according to the assessment.

The railway would span about 304 miles and link three states — Illinois, Indiana and Michigan — with trains that could reach a speed of 110 mph.

Chemical engineering senior Tom Sicilian said the high-speed rail could benefit the community.

“I really think it’s a good way of transportation,” he said. “It’s cheap and it lets people commute better.”

But civil and environmental engineering professor Richard Lyles said the benefits offered by the rail are not worth the cost and the rails would not be utilized often enough, citing a survey in which respondents said they favored high-speed rails but then indicated them frequently.

“To really support this kind of system, we need a ton of people willing to travel from point A to point B,” he said. “When we ask, ‘Where is point A and point B,’ they were cities that couldn’t be serviced by rail.”

High-speed rails are unnecessary and overly expensive, Lyles said. The number of people using the rail instead of driving would not be enough to significantly benefit the economy, he said.

“It’s kind of an appealing thing, people think ‘Gee, it’d be cool to have this like the Europeans and Japanese have,’” he said. “But we have to be realistic. Who is going to pay it, what kind of transportation systems do we need to give them? High rail isn’t it.”

But economics professor Kenneth Boyer said the presence of high-speed rails in America’s future is inevitable as people realize the negative effects of global warming, and gas prices will increase and switching to a different form of transportation will become necessary, he said.

“The only way to make us use less fossil fuel is to raise the price of fuel, and then once that happens, then that increases the density of cities where people are going to be living closer to their work instead of the countryside and then public transportation is going to start to make sense.”

Federal funding designations are not expected to be announced until at least late fall, and so it is uncertain whether the high-speed rail will come to Michigan,
said Janet Foran, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Transportation, or MDOT.

“We’re very hopeful that we will be able to capture some of the federal money, but there’s no way of telling at this time,” she said.