I love me some infrastructure, and there are few things I geek out about more than railroad infrastructure --especially when it affects Amtrak's Northeast Corridor. It's kind of insane that such an important transit artery has been systematically starved by Republicans for so long. Now, more than a dozen century-old bridges and tunnels, the backbone of the nation’s most important rail corridor, are set to receive nearly $9 billion in new infrastructure grants, U.S. Department of Transportation officials said this week. Thanks, President Biden! Via the Washington Post:

The projects include the Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel, which opened in 1873, when Ulysses S. Grant was president. The 1.4-mile tunnel is now beset with crumbling brick and sinking floor slabs, leaving Amtrak trains creeping beneath West Baltimore at 30 mph on their way up and down the East Coast.

The list of “major backlog” projects federal officials say they are finally preparing to fund reads like a history of American infrastructure greatness frozen in amber, among them Connecticut’s Walk Bridge over the Norwalk River (Grover Cleveland), New Jersey’s Sawtooth Bridges between Newark Penn Station and Secaucus Junction (Theodore Roosevelt) and the North River Tunnel beneath the Hudson River (William Howard Taft). All are more than a hundred years old and in desperate need of overhauls.

“I know that may be hard to comprehend, but … that’s why we call it a backlog,” Amit Bose, administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, said in an interview. “These projects have been waiting, waiting to get going — for the next hundred years.”