Dear Editor,
(Features Editor Emily Letterman’s) “
Amtrak should reconsider Springfield line” opinion piece made some very good points. It’s not Amtrak that needs to be convinced to come to Springfield, however, but (the Missouri Department of Transportation) and the state legislature.
Since 1979, Amtrak has operated the Kansas City-St. Louis trains under a program Amtrak has for states to fund the majority of any losses on a route. Due to state funding issues, for brief periods there has been only one passenger train a day on that line. But for the majority of the time, there have been two trains a day each way. In recent years, with funding from federal “shovel ready” projects, a passing (loop) and a bridge have been installed on that line to make the on-time performance of that service even more reliable.
Amtrak service to Springfield makes sense for a host of economic development and tourism reasons, in addition to just the aspect of serving those of us who live here. Other states are seeing the value of passenger rail, too. Just today, I read an article about how Virginia has begun construction of a station in Roanoke for service there. “Bringing passenger-rail service back to Roanoke will be an enormous economic driver for the region and the entire commonwealth,” Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe was quoted as saying.
The 2007 study mentioned in Springfield Business Journal’s column was flawed and seemed to take a worst-case scenario when predicting travel time and revenue. For one thing, we’re a college city with several thousand students from the St. Louis area and all the study says we can generate is 34,000 passengers a year? For another, the last year Frisco ran passenger trains on that route – 1966 – the trip took about four hours, so why is a trip now projected to take six hours, particularly when BNSF runs a highway-competitive intermodal freight train on that route today?
There also are innovative steps that could be explored to reduce a train’s cost that were not mentioned in the study, such as perhaps contracting out food service in the cafe car. There are tilt trains, such as the ones operated by Amtrak between Portland, Ore., and Seattle, that can take curves at faster speeds than conventional train sets, but they were not mentioned in the study.
Yes, it’s time we had rail passenger service to Springfield. Someday maybe our legislators and MoDOT will recognize that.
—Dave Riddle, Springfield
