(The Associated Press circulated the following article by Stephanie V. Siek on October 5.)
KIRKWOOD, Mo. — Members of a committee studying transportation needs in the state pressed support for preserving and possibly expanding Missouri’s Amtrak service in the long term during a hearing Monday.
But the one thing that is key to making the service more viable and available — funding — is scarce.
“There just aren’t a lot of options. But we’re continuing to look,” committee chair and state Sen. John Griesheimer, R-Washington, said during a news conference at the Kirkwood rail depot.
Missouri has two daily trains between St. Louis and Kansas City, that make eight stops along the way. The state subsidizes Amtrak’s service by contributing $6.2 million each year — second only to Illinois in contributions among the surrounding states.
The public hearing Monday in Kirkwood of the Joint Interim Committee on Multimodal Transportation was the fourth of five such meetings around the state; the group will make recommendations to the Legislature next year. Tuesday the committee will go to Washington, Mo. to hear from residents, local government and transport officials, and rail-riders there.
The committee is studying ways to establish partnerships with railroads that would reduce delays caused by rail traffic jams and make Amtrak’s operation of rail service in the state more efficient and less dependent on state funds.
One way to do that would be to increase ridership. But as delays on the line became longer and more frequent because of recent track upgrades and construction, ridership figures dropped, committee member state Rep. David Pearce said. The route served about 167,000 people last year — an average of 457 passengers per day.
That’s down from 1998 or 1999, when about 200,000 passengers rode the line, said Pearce, a Republican from Warrensburg.
During Monday’s hearing, Kirkwood Mayor Mike Swoboda said that passenger rail service should be considered a necessary form of transportation — an affordable, fast way for working people with different needs to move across the state.
“The vision we should have is not a weekend, leisurely trip,” Swoboda said.
The Kirkwood station, a quaint stone structure in the heart of the St. Louis suburb’s Victorian downtown, hosts four Amtrak trains a day. It is run entirely by volunteers, who stepped up to keep the station working in April 2003, when budget cuts forced Amtrak to pull its ticket agent. The city purchased the station that December.
Bill Burckhalter, the station’s volunteer coordinator, told the committee that there’s plenty of interest in rail travel — the station remained open on weekends so people could pick up information on Amtrak schedules. But delays of up to five hours dimmed people’s enthusiasm. He said the way to win back dissatisfied customers was for Amtrak to do a better job of letting people know what’s going on and to offer compensation when possible.
The committee heard other suggestions — following the Kansas City to St. Louis local service route with an express, making point-to-point service available to cities like Springfield and Branson, and building more tracks to accommodate more trains.
Pearce said that most of the hearings’ testimony has been supportive of Amtrak. But before express routes or other expansion can be considered, the committee has to convince legislative colleagues that passenger rail service is worth maintaining.
“At this point, we just have to put the funding in to make sure it continues, because I think if we lost it, it’d be gone forever,” Pearce said.