Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Air
Columbus, Ohio: Tubular Rail, a futuristic train technology that operates without conventional rail tracks or bridges, was among the top 50 new, bright ideas selected last week by a group of accredited investors and entrepreneurs in California called The Perfect Pitch 2009, creating a stark contrast with Ohio transportation and development officials, who over more than a year have generally ignored it, despite the state's desperate need for new jobs, especially in manufacturing, to replace the millions lost over just the last nine years..
Perfect Pitch 2009 announced last week that it narrowed its selection of projects from the more than 1,000 that were submitted to 50 and will whittle that number further to 3 lucky contestants, who will be present when Sir Richard Branson, the energy, talent and money behind Virgin Air and other successful ventures, keynotes the group's meeting in Marina del Rey, CA on October 26th..jpg)
Tubular Rail Inc., a small Texas technology company with a big idea it believes will revolutionize how we think about trains when its prototype is built, likely in a transportation test area close to the small scrub-brush town of Pecos, TX, has tried with little success to court Ohio transportation and development officials since mid July of 2008.
Despite a slapdash meeting with Ohio's top transportation and railroad officials last November and a formal engagement with top development officials in early May of this year, Tubular Rail has received little more than a token letter from ODOD officials proffering the train technology company vague promises of help set up its Ohio-based manufacturing supply chain.
Clearly, the accredited investors and entrepreneurs at Perfect Pitch see what Ohio's economic development and transportation officials cannot, namely, a reinvention of how we think about trains that can birth new mode of transportation and create tens of thousands of new jobs along the way in manufacturing, an industry the state is hemorrhaging jobs by the month in, helping propel its unemployment rate to 11.1 percent. .jpg)
As a Sunday edition article in The Columbus Dispatch reveals, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland's efforts at resuscitating a state now on job life support is to some cloudy at best and a failure to others, who point to a near doubling of the state's unemployment rate since the first-term Democrat took office in January of 2007 as proof positive his efforts have done little to create any net new jobs.
Frank Sonzala, Executive Vice President of Pressure Systems International Inc., flew to Columbus in early May with Robert Pulliam, inventor and patent holder of Tubular Rail's advance train technology, to meet with the then-top officials of the Ohio Dept. of Development.
Sonzala, writing in his Perfect Pitch pitch, said he has been known in his 39 years of entrepreneurial work, to "make rocks float," and says Tubular Rail represents a fourth mode of transportation that he projects to be "bigger than Microsoft."
Even though Tubular Rail officials have repeatedly knocked on the door of Ohio transportation and development officials for nearly 15 months to show some real interest other than issuing a token letter of vague support, the company who has now amassed by virtue of its own work a growing list of formidable private sector parters, including steel and advanced fiber manufacturers, a provider of third-rail electric and one that can provide sophisticated software and controls, who see the potential the company offers and have now signed on to make that vision a reality.
Gleaned from a public records request made recently to the Ohio Dept. of Transportation about what discussion took place after accommodating the company with a meeting nearly a year ago, Tubular Rail learned that no discussion ensued from that meeting, and that Ohio's top transportation and rail officials, who were part of a review process including ODOD on its application for federal transportation stimulus funds, chose to ignore the company's revolutionary train technology, assigning it to a file labeled "future transportation."
Meanwhile, the same officials have spent millions to gather support for a slow train to the past whose start up costs for a train whose average speed will be 57 miles per hour now totals $564 million and whose timetable for actually running could be years away, given that rolling stock like engines and passenger rail cars, are not now available and may not be for years to come.
Tubular Rail officials say its fast, energy efficient and grade separated system can be up and running in under two years.
Ohio's application, due last Friday, will be further complicated by the Federal Railroad Administration, the federal agency evaluating the many proposals from states who have visions of high speed trains running in their heads, due to its criteria that will reward states like California and Florida who have plans and funding in place over states like Ohio which fall flat on both criteria.
Ohio has not had a passenger train running diagonally from Cincinnati to Cleveland in nearly 50 years, even though the same route was running in 1852, two years after train tracks were first laid in Ohio.
Sonzala is hopeful Tubular Rail will be one of the top 3 ideas that will be presented in California later in October.
For Ohio, a state where steel, rubber and glass industrial titans roamed the landscape for decades, creating middle class jobs that helped grow Ohio's once mighty urban cores, the lack of attention to a company like Tubular Rail that hopes to find its commercial Kitty Hawk in a state like Ohio, the uphill climb it has had with state officials who have been lambasted for essentially creating no jobs as jobs flit away each month is curious indeed.
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