(The following article by David Patch was posted on the Toledo Blade website on September 3.)
TOLEDO, Ohio — Passenger-train service to Fostoria, Akron, and Youngstown will end March 1, with sleeping cars on the route to be discontinued Nov. 1, Amtrak will announce today.
Marc Magliari, an Amtrak spokesman, said yesterday that the service cancellation is associated with Amtrak’s decision to stop handling bulk mail on its trains – a decision that also will be made public today, although Amtrak notified its employees about it last month.
“It certainly saddens us to be leaving these communities,” several of which contributed local resources to improve station facilities, Mr. Magliari said. “But it is a decision that was designed to improve overall the quality of our passenger service.”
Elimination of the New York-Chicago “Three Rivers” train west of Pittsburgh will reduce Amtrak’s service in Ohio to two pairs of nightly trains running across the state’s northern tier and a route through Hamilton and Cincinnati that runs three times a week in each direction. Early last year, Amtrak ended a third pair of trains through Toledo and Cleveland after the rail line stopped handling expedited cargo.
About 300 jobs will be eliminated systemwide when Amtrak stops handling mail – most of them at major terminals like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, but including eight positions in Toledo.
The loss of service to Fostoria, Akron, and Youngstown is “regrettable,” said Stu Nicholson, spokesman for the Ohio Rail Development Commission. But in the larger picture, he said, Amtrak’s action is “a very encouraging sign that they are being cost-conscious and looking at the bottom line of their operations.”
Ken Prendergast, a spokesman for the Ohio Association of Railroad Passengers, was less charitable.
“Mail was obviously causing some problems for the reliability of their passenger operations,” he said last night. “I’m disappointed that they couldn’t find a way to make it work. I’m even more disappointed, if not downright angry, that Ohio is bearing the brunt of this decision.”
Passenger traffic at the Ohio stations, however, has been light. Between October, 2002, and September, 2003, the most recent Amtrak fiscal year for which data is available, 1,814 people got on or off the train in Fostoria – an average of 2 1/2 per train. Youngstown had a 4.9 average, while Akron’s was 9.4.
“It’s sad news, but it’s a matter of economics,” Fostoria Mayor John Davoli said last night.
It will be at least the third time that Fostoria will lose train service. Amtrak’s 1971 takeover of most intercity trains in the United States brought an end to the last runs on the Baltimore & Ohio line through town. In 1990, Lima, Ohio’s loss was Fostoria’s gain when the Broadway Limited was shifted onto the old B&O because the tracks through Lima were downgraded.
Amtrak budget cuts in 1995 felled the Broadway, but service was reinstated the following year as the Three Rivers because mail and express cargo business, then growing, was overwhelming Amtrak’s other trains across Ohio.
The importance of mail and express freight to the Three Rivers’ existence was evident in its cars – the five passenger-carrying cars on a typical run were often overshadowed by 15 or more cargo-carrying cars. But in recent times, Mr. Magliari said, those cargo cars’ loadings dwindled.
Amtrak also plans to shorten its New York-Tampa-Miami “Palmetto” train to a southern terminus of Savannah, Ga., because mail service on that run too is ending, Mr. Magliari said. No other service cuts are anticipated, he said.
Mr. Magliari noted that both the Capitol Limited and Lake Shore Limited trains, which stop in Toledo, will have faster schedules once mail handling ends because car-switching delays will be eliminated. Such delays have been an irritant for passengers, especially when trains were already late and fell further behind schedule because of mail handling.
Bulk mail has been “a marginal business for us,” he said. “It does not justify the toll it takes on our passenger operations.”