(The following story by Mike Ramsey of Copley News Service appeared on the Peoria Journal Star website on November 8.)
CHICAGO — Truck driver Ellen Clark of Morton, Miss., had never ridden a train in her life, but she gave it a try this month.
“I wanted to experience it,” the 52-year-old leisure traveler said Wednesday during a layover at Union Station’s crowded waiting room. “I was really impressed with the smoothness of the ride? I’d ride it again.”
Retiree Bob Allen, 71, of Wichita Falls, Texas, had a different story about the coach ride from Pennsylvania. He said his first rail trip in 50 years was inexpensive, but cramped and uncomfortable.
“The seats wouldn’t go back and the footrest didn’t footrest,” Allen complained.
Still, he came aboard Amtrak. Millions of others have, too, in record numbers.
Slightly more than 24 million passengers rode intercity trains during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 – Amtrak’s highest ridership in its 32-year history. Nearly all of the train routes through Illinois logged increases in ridership in the same period.
Subsidy-reliant Amtrak nearly shut down two summers ago for lack of money, and it’s a perennial whipping dog for some members of Congress. Yet riders have noticed trains are running more efficiently and have taken advantage of reduced fares and specials over the past year, according to Amtrak officials and rail advocates.
“Travel in general is up,” says Rick Harnish, executive director of the Midwest High-Speed Rail Coalition in Chicago. “Trains are running on time because of the management team. The management team is focusing more on getting riders on the train, and that’s good. Those three things put together have paid off well.”
Average “on-time” performance improved for most state-assisted trains during the first nine months of the year compared to the same period in 2002, according to figures provided by the Illinois Department of Transportation. Similarly, the notoriously late Texas Eagle, a
long-distance train from San Antonio that stops in Springfield and Normal, has been able to meet its Chicago arrival times more closely.
The train had an on-time performance rate of 70 percent in September, compared to 17 percent in September 2002, IDOT said. In August, it was 61 percent, compared to zero percent in August 2002.
Ridership for the Texas Eagle jumped 20 percent during the record Amtrak year.
Marc Magliari, the Chicago spokesman for Amtrak, said the railroad would continue to employ a ‘back-to-basics’ marketing campaign with a modest advertising budget. Among the temporary deals the railroad offered this year was a Springfield-to-Chicago ticket for $16 one way, roughly half the regular cost.
‘Instead of fuzzy advertising that talks about trains, they’re great which, of course, they are we’ll be spending advertising funds to promote specific fares and specific destinations,’ Magliari said.
News of the banner year for Amtrak ridership comes as the U.S. House and Senate are in the final stages of negotiating the railroad’s latest federal grant.
President David Gunn, who’s in his second year running Amtrak, likely won’t get the $1.8 billion he requested to help finance operations and capital repairs. Observers predict, however, that he’ll get more than the $900 million proposed by Washington’s Amtrak critics a sum Gunn has called a ‘shutdown number.’
‘It’s awfully difficult for some of the Amtrak haters in Congress to say this is a ridiculous, redundant service that we don’t need anymore,’ said rail proponent James Coston, a Chicago attorney who sat on the Amtrak Reform Council. ‘The riders, who are predominantly taxpayers, are voting with their pocketbooks by buying tickets on Amtrak trains everywhere in the country.’
Coston and Harnish, the lobbyist for high-speed rail, say Amtrak and IDOT should capitalize on the ridership uptick by adding more train frequencies on the Chicago-to-St.-Louis corridor. Passengers currently can choose from three daily
round-trip schedules on the line, which has been partly upgraded for speed increases in the future.