(The following story by Jefferson Wolfe appeared on the Tiffin Advertiser-Tribune website on September 4.)
FOSTORIA, Ohio — Amtrak will stop making passenger runs through Fostoria, as part of a route to Youngstown and Akron that will be discontinued.
Mayor John Davoli met with Ray Lang, Amtrak’s director of government affairs, who told him the “Three Rivers” line’s service is to be discontinued in six months.
During that six months, the railroad will be seeking public input about the service, Davoli said. Lang has agreed to speak about the matter at a future meeting of Fostoria City Council.
“We do feel bad,” Davoli said. “But economically, it doesn’t work for them, and they just cannot operate in the red.”
The trains travel through Fostoria and pick up passengers at night. There were only a couple of passengers a night in Fostoria, Davoli said.
The railroad had been receiving a subsidy for carrying bulk mail along with transporting passengers, Davoli said. The subsidy allowed the railroad to offset the cost of the passenger service, and without the mail income, Amtrak could not continue passenger service.
In Amtrak’s recent negotiations with the United States Postal Service, the railroad needed more money to continue the service than the post office was willing to offer, according to Stu Nicholson, a public information officer for the Ohio Rail Development Commission.
Lang also spoke to the commission and laid out a very good business case as to why the service was being discontinued, he said.
“This is something that had to be done,” Nicholson said.
There were 12,268 total passengers that traveled on the Three Rivers line in Ohio in fiscal year 2003, he said. Divide that number by 365, and then by two, because each passenger generally travels two ways, and this produces a statewide average of about 17 passengers a day, Nicholson said.
Typically the line would have 15-20 mail cars on a train, and five passenger cars, one of which was a sleeper, he said.
Despite Amtrak’s pullout, CSX is continuing to renovate the depot, located on South Main Street, Davoli said. He hopes to work with the Ohio Rail Development Commission to bring some kind of short passenger line to the city in the future.