WESTPORT — Standing outside the Westport train station Friday morning, state and local officials touted plans to invest nearly $13 billion into Connecticut's rail lines over the next five years.

The $12.7 billion investment is part of the state's 2022-26 Connecticut State Rail Plan, Department of Transportation Senior Adviser Carlo Leone said.

"This Connecticut rail plan is a mandated plan that we have to submit to the U.S. Department of Transportation and it's our five-year mapping plan to bring us into the future," Leone said. "What is important to the riders here in Connecticut: Reliability, speed, safety, making sure the trains run on time. All those are things that this plan addressed and incorporates and invests in for the future."

Integral projects within the plan include updating infrastructure along the rail lines, with the goal of decreasing travel time to New York by 25 minutes, connecting trains to allow riders to get from New Haven to Penn Station, and potentially from Penn Station to Grand Central Terminal, and adding Wi-Fi to all trains.

"The New Haven line recovered 66 percent and more of ridership as COVID is thankfully almost behind us, so ridership is coming back, and people are excited to be riding our new M8 trains. Shoreline East has just gotten new trains and we are investing in our transportation centers," Leone said.

Funds for the various projects come from a series of streams, including federal and state dollars, Leone said.

Of the $12.7 billion: $8.7 billion is for the New Haven line; $12.5 million is for the Danbury line; $120 million is for Waterbury and $921 million for Hartford, and "many more millions of dollars along the corridor," Leone said.

"Much of it is coming from the federal government, but also there's an investment from the state and together that's going to be a sizable chunk of what we will be doing going forward," Leone said. "We are doing many in parallel. All are just as critical as the other because one feeds off the other. It's a huge undertaking and we are doing multifaceted work at the same time."

With some of the smaller projects in the plan already underway, rail riders should see a difference in their train experience within the next two years, Leone said.

"I'm thinking about two or three years for some of those bigger investments to take place, but the little things will be key as well," Leone said.

The state rail plan ensures Connecticut complies with the federal Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008, according to a DOT statement. Work on the new plan began in 2021 and several public hearings were held for the plan over the course of last year.

The draft of the master plan is available online and public comment is open until Monday, according to the DOT.

Metro-North Railroad is the busiest commuter rail line in the country, state Sen. Will Haskell, D-Westport, said Friday. The railroad carries about 43 million riders each year.

"It's also a train line that's gotten slower, not faster, over the last 50 years and the Connecticut state rail plan aims to change that," Haskell said. "We are talking about improvements to see faster service, 25 minutes saved for commuters by 2035. There is nothing more valuable that we can give our constituents than their own time back, time to get to the office a little bit earlier or time to get home to their kids and tuck in their children before bed, to have dinner with their families."

The master plan is also a collaboration with other entities outside of the state, such as the state of New York and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates Metro-North, Haskell said.

"We can't get Connecticut trains into Penn Station until certain New York projects come to fruition," Haskell said as an example. "There're federal and state investments, local investments to be sure on our side of the border, but there's also a lot happening in partnership with New York."