(The Clarion-Ledger published the following story by Marianne Todd on its website on August 17.)
MERIDIAN, Miss. — A New Orleans scoot-boogie jingle isn’t the only reason passenger rail service is making a comeback.
“There are a lot of reasons, but I think people feel more comfortable and safe in light of recent events,” said Amtrak marketing specialist Jerome Trahan. “There is a fear of flying that people are more conscious of these days, and people are starting to understand that slowing down is a great way to travel.”
Trahan said Amtrak has seen an increase in ridership, and a significant amount of that has been on its Mississippi lines, The City of New Orleans and The Crescent.
Hopes of a passenger rail comeback were what prompted Meridian Mayor John Robert Smith to revitalize crumbling Union Station into a state-of-the-art, multimodal transportation center.
When air service was disabled after 9-11, the national passenger rail was virtually the only mass public transportation available. Since then, Amtrak has survived despite failed attempts at self-sufficiency and political infighting about the uncertainty of future congressional funding.
“We’re experiencing the highest ridership and revenues in Amtrak’s 30-plus year history,” said Smith, an Amtrak board member during the Clinton administration. “There’s been a 40- to 50-percent increase in ridership, which means people are more and more making passenger rail their chosen method of transportation.”
In the 1850s, before Meridian incorporated as a city, the Gulf-Mobile Ohio railroad had plans to run its Chicago-based railroad through Enterprise, which at the time served as a steamboat hub of transportation, said historian Fonda Rush.
But when Meridian founders John and Richard McLemore, Louis Ragsdale and John Ball heard the news, they made a huge pitch to win the attention of the railroad, Rush said.
“They knew it meant economic development, so they built a flag station, which wasn’t a regular stop on the line,” Rush said. “If they wanted the train to stop they had to run out and flag it down. It intrigued the railroad so much they moved the tracks over to Meridian.”
By 1870, Meridian’s Capt. William Hardy began talk of bridging New Orleans and Meridian with a rail line over Lake Pontchartrain. The idea at the time was laughable, Rush said.
“But by the 1880s, Hardy had persuaded enough investors to build the bridge and connect New Orleans to Cincinnati,” she said. “These days that line runs to New York.”
By the turn of the century, Meridian occupied five major railroad lines with 44 trains coming through each day.
The city today serves as a transportation hub for millions of tons of freight each year via the Norfolk Southern and Kansas City Southern lines. But proponents of a renewed Amtrak want to see the same high-speed rail enjoyed by northeast corridor commuters, although they disagree on the source of funding.
A proposed $60 billion in congressional funding would serve to improve rail lines, forcing improvement of efficiency for both freight and passenger rail, Smith said. He said President Bush’s plan to privatize Amtrak would become a political impossibility since each state would have to agree to subsidize the deficit and figure out a way to pay for it.
“I don’t know of a state whose budget is so flushed that they’re looking for ways to spend money,” Smith said. “You would have to get legislators and governors to agree on how to split the funding with budgets that already are in the red. And what if a state opted not to pay for the rail passenger deficit? What do we do, go over Tennessee?”
Privatization is a misleading word when it comes to Amtrak reformation, said Gil Carmichael, who served as a federal railroad administrator in the first Bush administration and who recently completed a term on the Amtrak Reform Council. Ten years after serving the first President Bush, Carmichael is still making Amtrak recommendations to a Bush administration.
“Rail is strong. They’ve got almost a billion a year in passenger tickets, but their equipment is antiquated and they need restructuring,” Carmichael said. “The White House is not against supporting them if they will restructure. … We’ve given Amtrak $26 billion over the years, and we still don’t have a good passenger system.”
In his most recent report to the White House, Carmichael said rail service is currently operating at 25 percent of its capacity. It is a point on which both he and Smith agree ? that any improvements to rail will bring about their collective goal of high-speed rail through Mississippi.
The rail improvements can go only so far, though, Carmichael said.
“We need Amtrak to start acting like a passenger company instead of an old railroad. They need to … concentrate on moving passengers,” Carmichael said.