 One of the things I hear over and over again over the many years I've been in the legislature is when are we going to get high-speed rail from Western Massachusetts to Boston? And boy, that's been a long-standing desire of the people out here. And we as Western Mass legislators are always looking for opportunities to promote this idea. And the closest we've ever gotten was to get some language in to get an initial study done with regard to the cost and what would be involved in doing high-speed rail from Western Mass to the Boston area until recently when the federal government decided to put a significant amount of new money into high-speed rail and just general rail improvements both for passenger and freight rail. And Congressman John Olver from our region happens to be the Appropriations Committee chair of the Committee on Transportation, Urban Development and Housing. And as such, he was able to exercise some pretty significant influence to try to move that agenda forward in Washington and as a result created a significant amount of new money for that effort. As a result, we knew that Massachusetts in New England was going to be in competition with the other regions of the country and we wanted to position ourselves to be in better shape for competing for those dollars. And so the Council of State Governments just happened to be holding a meeting in Vermont two summers ago and as chair of the Regional Transportation Authority caucus, I decided to see if I could organize all of the New England states at that meeting to see if we could have a conversation about coordinating our planning and application for funding so that we could maximize the amount of money coming into the region. And as part of that meeting we got Governor Dukakis, former Governor Dukakis to be the moderator. Congressman Olver was there as was Congressman Larson from Connecticut and they were able to get the rail executive at the Federal Highway and Rail Administration to come to the conference. And so now we had all of the big players from Washington at the table who needed to be at the table and we were then able to attract all of the Secretaries of Transportation and many of the co-chairs of the Transportation Committees and the Legislatures throughout New England. They met for about two and a half hours. We thought we'd attract maybe 30 to 50 people to this meeting and there ended up being over 150 people. It was the largest meeting at the conference, spill over crowd into the hall and so everybody understood from that event just how important and how excited people were about the possibility of finally improving rail transportation in our region. Well since then our state government has come up with money, our federal government has come up with money and we actually in New England won some of the money that a few of the other regions had applied for and then found they were going to be unable to implement their projects and so we were able to go in and scoop up some of that additional money as a result of being as well organized and coordinated as we were. So one of the things you do as a legislator is you're always looking for opportunities and you never know when they're going to appear and in this case the fact that the federal government was going to make available a lot of money and our region wanted to be effective in competing for the money provided the opportunity for us to bring all of these players together with the help of our regional planning agency, our congressman, our former governor, Mr. Dukakis and all of the legislative leaders and the secretaries of transportation coming together really made a huge difference and while we still have a long way to go in our overall goal of improving our chances of getting high speed rail between west and east we are definitely taking steps forward as the projects that are being funded with these new federal dollars are laying the foundation for improving both passenger and freight rail here in western Massachusetts and some day will lead to high speed rail from here to there.