(The following story by Dennis J. Carroll appeared on The Hawk Eye website on July 25.)
DENVER — Representatives of communities along Amtrak’s California Zephyr line, including Burlington and Mount Pleasant, gathered here Tuesday to hear top rail executives launch a nationwide plan to restore deteriorating passenger train depots, which in many towns have given Amtrak a rather scruffy image.
“For our customers, each (Amtrak depot) is portal to the railroad,” said Amtrak President and CEO Alex Kummant, the rail line’s man in charge since September. “So their rehabilitation and renovation are matters of great importance to us.
“It’s hard for passengers to see the effort we put into track maintenance and we take mechanical excellence for granted until there is a breakdown or delay,” Kummant said, “but the condition of the stations along our route is apparent to all our passengers.”
Kummant said the rail line’s new Great American Stations project was inspired by a recent dramatic increase in Amtrak passenger ridership, which overall jumped nearly 5.5 percent this fiscal year.
Ridership along inter-city routes has grown 6.8 percent in a year, which, Kummant said, “tells us what a remarkable demand there is out there for inter city passenger rail.”
In recent years, Kummant said, Amtrak has focused on stepping up recapitalization of its rolling stock of trains and equipment, and “we are now turning to improving, repairing and renovating our stations.”
He said the goal is to work closely with communities to revive the stations and “to ensure they are economically useful to our passengers and to the local communities.”
As a start, Amtrak’s Great American Stations Web site, GreatAmericanStations.com, offers communities insights into how Amtrak can help local officials rehabilitate their Amtrak stations, turning them into centers of downtown redevelopment.
The site offers sources of possible funding, advice on negotiating with depot owners — often freight rail lines and private developers — and design and planning suggestions.
Cities and other Amtrak depot landlords are being sent details of needed improvements to their stations and ways to go about renovation projects. The great majority of Amtrak depots are not owned by Amtrak, rail officials said.
Copies of those proposals were not made available to workshop participants on Tuesday. Amtrak officials said they wanted to give the landlords first crack at the proposals and release them as they wish.
At the conference, at Denver’s historic Union Station, representatives from several communities shared success stories about their depot restoration projects.
It was only eight years ago that downtown Meridian, Miss., “was dead, just dead,” said John Robert Smith, mayor of the town of 40,000.
He said the gift of the station and five acres from the Norfolk Southern Railway Co. to the community sparked an economic boom that helped leverage $123 million in economic development money from a variety of sources.
The once-blighted downtown is now replete with residences, museums, galleries, restaurants and other businesses that have been built around the rail passenger and bus hub.
Kristopher Ackerson, transportation planner for the Southeast Iowa Regional Planning Commission, represented the city of Burlington at the Denver meeting.
He said the gathering was a reminder that “depots were once a major transportation hub for their communities” and that there’s a blossoming renaissance for rail service in America.
“It’s becoming much more popular, as the speakers here said, and ridership is up 6 percent overall in the last year. And the year before that it was up 12 percent,” Ackerson said.
He noted that Burlington has hired an architect and taken other steps to begin an inventory of the depot’s problems and potential.
Ackerson said he hopes Amtrak’s report will provide examples of how similar communities restored their rail stations, and will offer suggestions for funding sources.
He said the meeting provided a chance to establish contact with Amtrak officials and representatives of other communities who could be called on for help as Burlington’s depot restoration plans proceed.
Mount Pleasant City Councilman Matt Crull, also at the Denver meeting, said his city has a plan in the works to revitalize the area around the city’s Amtrak station.
Crull said the city jumped on the Amtrak conference as a chance to “investigate the funding sources out there to be able to revitalize the station.”
He said the Mount Pleasant station is in fairly good condition on the outside but needs interior improvements.
“It’s not in bad condition, but definitely needs updating,” Crull said.
In his address, Kummant hit hard at America’s loving relationship with trains.
“For over a century, Americans have boarded trains at their stations,” Kummant said. “Boarded them to go away to college or to work, to get married, to attend births of grandchildren and to see the country and world.
“For many generations the railroad station has been a gateway to everywhere,” he said. “With work and cooperation we ensure that those gateways are around another century.”