(The following story by Faith Bremner appeared on the Great Falls Tribune website on October 31.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Amtrak soon may have to reconsider its decision 28 years ago to eliminate passenger rail service through southern Montana.
Montana Democratic Sen. Jon Tester this week successfully amended an Amtrak funding bill to require the company to consider reinstating the old North Coast Hiawatha route between Chicago and Seattle. The Senate approved the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2007 on Tuesday by a vote of 70-22. The House has not yet taken up its version of the bill.
A portion of the old route passed through Glendive, Miles City, Billings, Bozeman, Butte and Missoula before Amtrak abandoned it in a cost-cutting move in 1979.
Although it’s highly unlikely the railroad would ever resurrect the old route in its entirety, it’s possible that Tester’s amendment could lead Amtrak to restore segments of the former route in Montana, said Jim Green, president of the Montana/Wyoming Association of Railroad Passengers.
Green’s group has long advocated reinstating passenger rail service in the southern part of the state, starting with routes between Billings and Missoula and then Billings to Shelby via Great Falls.
The Billings to Shelby route would connect customers to Amtrak’s existing Empire Builder route, which hauls passengers between Chicago and Seattle/Portland.
“You have to crawl before you can run,” said Green, who lives in Billings. “Oil is at $92 a barrel and pushing toward the $100 mark, which will push up gasoline to about $5 a gallon. How many people can afford that? It makes sense now to get ready for it.”
The Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2007, sponsored by Sens. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., attempts to reverse years of starvation budgets for Amtrak. The bill would authorize Congress to spend $11.4 billion over the next six years on passenger rail service. In 1997, the last time Congress updated and renewed Amtrak operations, the Republican-controlled Congress authorized spending $5.3 billion on passenger rail service over five years.
During the 2007 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, Amtrak received $1.3 billion from the federal government to supplement its approximately $2 billion in revenue. Under the pending legislation, Amtrak could be in line to get nearly $1.9 billion next fiscal year. The company spends about $300 million a year paying off debt it took on to keep its trains running.
“This is an authorization bill, it’s quite common that the appropriations committees do not appropriate every dollar authorized,” said Ross Capon, executive director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, a nonpartisan group that lobbies for passenger rail service. “Certainly having a strong bipartisan vote for passenger trains will be a plus.”
Amtrak’s ridership was up 6.3 percent in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. The number of riders on Amtrak’s 15 long distance routes was up 2.4 percent, including a 1.6 percent increase in ridership on the Empire Builder — Amtrak’s most popular long-distance train, hauling 504,977 passengers.