(The following article by Elisa Crouch was posted on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website on March 22.)
ST. LOUIS, Mo. — Major track repair across Missouri this year will once again affect Amtrak service between St. Louis and Kansas City.
Amtrak announced Wednesday that schedules will change on April 2. The line’s owner, Union Pacific Railroad, began work in February on $27 million in track improvements between St. Louis and Jefferson City, affecting the two daily St. Louis-to-Kansas City round trips. The work will continue until November.
The work follows $32 million in construction last summer that forced Amtrak and the Missouri Department of Transportation to put train passengers on chartered buses to get around construction.
Under the new schedule, the morning train to Kansas City will leave St. Louis at 6 a.m., instead of 8:30 a.m., and the afternoon train will depart at 4:30 p.m. instead of 3:30 p.m. The new schedule is available on Amtrak’s website,
www.amtrak.com.
The railroad will be installing ties, ballast and replacing surfaces at road crossings. The improvements will make tracks safer and more reliable, said Randy Blackburn, an officer with Union Pacific.
Amtrak ridership is up nationwide. But the number of riders between St. Louis and Kansas City dropped 12.8 percent in the year ending in September, to about 119,000 passengers. Amtrak says it was a consequence of having to put train passengers on buses last summer and fall. The buses had less capacity.
Ridership between St. Louis and Chicago is going the other direction. The two additional daily round trips between St. Louis and Chicago — the total number is now five —boosted ticket sales by about 30 percent in the four months after the extra trains began service, compared with the same four months in 2006.