(The following Associated Press report appeared on the Seattle Times website on April 10, 2009.)
SEATTLE, Wash. — Amtrak will spend about spend $50 million in federal stimulus funds in Washington and Oregon, where more than 2 million passengers traveled aboard Amtrak trains on the Coast Starlight, Amtrak Cascades and Empire Builder routes last year.
The biggest projects in the two states are two new buildings planned for Seattle. The buildings will cost Amtrak roughly $35 million and will replace buildings at Amtrak’s Seattle King Street Maintenance Facility; they will be used for maintenance, employee welfare and storage.
“In Amtrak-land, what we’re about to do in Seattle is significant,” said Jonathan Hutchison, Amtrak’s director of government affairs in the West. “That’s our big ticket, stimulus-funded project.”
Stimulus money also will go toward infrastructure repairs for Amtrak and providing wireless access to field workers.
The spending in Washington and Oregon is part of $1.3 billion pot set aside for Amtrak projects in the $787 billion federal economic stimulus package, which is meant to jump-start the economy and put the jobless back to work. The money will roughly double the size of Amtrak’s capital investment program over two years, said Vice President Joseph Biden, an Amtrak advocate who commuted between Washington and Wilmington, Del., by train when he was senator.
In all, the Amtrak projects are expected to create 6,000 jobs, said Vernae Graham, Amtrak spokeswoman in Oakland, Calif. But it is not yet certain how many jobs the projects in the Northwest will create, she said.
In two small Oregon towns, where passenger trains running on Amtrak’s Coast Starlight service between Seattle and Southern California rumble by daily, $277,000 in federal stimulus money will be spent to upgrade the stations and bring them into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
A wheelchair lift will be installed in Klamath Falls, Amtrak says, and a ramp and sidewalk will be built to connect a parking area with a new platform in Chemult.
Amtrak also will spend more than $53,000 in Vancouver, Clark County on similar upgrades, and about $260,000 will go toward projects at five other Washington stations to bring them within compliance with federal regulations.
In the Pacific Northwest, the Amtrak Cascades service is run by Amtrak under contract with the governments of Washington and Oregon. Its trains extend from Eugene., Ore., through Portland and Seattle to Vancouver, B.C. Amtrak Cascades trains had record ridership last year of 774,421 passengers, up from 676,670 passengers in 2007.
Amtrak’s spending plans for the Northwest, however, aren’t nearly as big nor as expensive as those planned in the Northeast U.S., where ridership is significantly higher and about $105 million will be spent there to replace a 102-year-old Connecticut bridge alone.
None of the money will go toward bridge repair in Washington and Oregon, Hutchison said, but the money will be used in both states to secure some passenger rails and repair other parts of the infrastructure. He did not provide further details on infrastructure projects but said many of the repairs are long overdue.
“We have a huge backlog we need to work through to put our house in order and to maximize efficiency of our improvements,” he said.
(Seattle Times staffer Kristin Jackson contributed to this report.)