(The following story by Jesse J. DeConto appeared at SeaCoastOnline.com on December 14.)
EXETER, N.H. — Despite sometimes slow speeds and inconvenient scheduling, Amtrak?s Downeaster is gaining steam thanks to Seacoast-area residents commuting to Boston for work.
After two years of the Amtrak Downeaster service, Exeter is the most popular access point for travel to and from Boston, behind only Portland, Maine, where southbound trains originate and northbound trains end.
This October, 39 passengers bought round-trip SmartPasses for the Exeter-to-Boston ride, nearly twice the next most popular commute between Durham and Exeter and almost four times the number of passes between Boston and Durham or Wells, Maine, which tied as the third most-utilized commuter connections. The monthly passes provide passengers with unlimited rides between their chosen city pairs. An Exeter-Boston SmartPass costs $160 per month, whereas a Monday-to-Friday commuter would pay $100 each week purchasing one-way tickets individually.
Overall, the New Hampshire Seacoast region is the largest source of Downeaster commuters. Even though Portland supplies by far the greatest number of passengers, they are leisure travelers or occasional business riders, rather than steady commuters, said Patricia Douglas, spokesperson for the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority, which manages the Downeaster.
“Most of our pass riders come from New Hampshire,” she said. “Those are the folks that ride probably four to five times a week.”
In October 2002, nearly half of the 21,916 Downeaster passengers rode the entire length of the rail between Portland and Boston. A year later, the Portland-Boston trip had shrunk by 12 percent, but ridership from Exeter, Saco and Wells, Maine, grew by the same percentage or more, and the number of Durham-Boston riders more than doubled after the University of New Hampshire station went from a weekend service to seven days a week last spring. That station alone erased the Portland loss and bolstered the strong passenger totals from southern Maine and the Seacoast region.
Every month from January to September saw lower ridership in 2003 than in 2002, and Downeaster ridership was 8 percent lower during that time frame, but more passengers rode the train in October 2003 than in October 2002. NNEPRA Executive Director John Englert said that?s a sign the Downeaster is bouncing back from months of ridership decline after the novelty wore off by September 2002.
October?s monthly pass sales in Exeter were the highest for any station in any month since the Downeaster opened. One of those passholders is Exeter resident Maurice Plourde, an airline contracting specialist who moved from Boston to Exeter a year ago to help his ailing parents.
“If the train wasn?t here, I don?t know if I would have stayed in Exeter,” he said. “Whether there?s a blizzard or not, it always runs, so it?s a lot more reliable than a car or a bus.”
Plourde said his company subsidizes his monthly train pass. “It literally costs me $2 a day to commute,” he said.
Plourde has gotten to know some of his fellow commuters, and they drive to the Exeter depot from towns such as Epping, Fremont, Hampton Falls and Raymond. A few, like him, can walk to work from Boston?s North Station. Most use the subway or buses once they arrive in Boston.
Transportation planner Scott Bogle said the Rockingham Planning Commission is poised to reorganize a committee whose role will be to analyze alternatives to augment the Downeaster service with public transit lines that connect residents of extreme coastal New Hampshire with rail opportunities. That could mean a train from the commuter rail station in Newburyport, Mass., to Kittery, Maine, or Dover, a rail spur from the Downeaster track in Newfields to downtown Portsmouth, or shuttle buses from Portsmouth, Seabrook and the Hamptons to the Exeter rail station.
Amtrak has not surveyed passengers to find out where they live or how they get to their nearest train station, but the demand in southeastern New Hampshire has sparked a focus on Plaistow as the next place to add a full-fledged Downeaster stop.
Bogle said Amtrak can tap into nearly $800,000 originally granted to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) to extend the T from Haverhill, Mass., into Plaistow. The MBTA stalled that proposal because it would create too much traffic on the limited track space north of the border, but Bogle said the federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) grant could easily transfer to the Downeaster.
“It would provide service to Plaistow without creating additional traffic on the rail lines,” Bogle said. “The key will be finding the local matching funds.”
With the state Department of Transportation tangled in a lawsuit with the N.H. Motor Transport Authority over using state highway funds for alternate modes of transit, Bogle said state funding is not available for the required 20 percent match of the federal funds.
“The state of New Hampshire isn?t putting anything into operations for the Downeaster service,” Bogle said.
Plaistow officials have called on other local communities to contribute to the estimated $140,000 local match to build a new train depot off Route 125 in Plaistow.
“That?s a very bare-bones estimate,” Bogle said. “I think the cost of the station is likely to be more than what was originally estimated.”
“Putting a station in Plaistow doesn?t mean just putting down a platform and stopping the train,” said Englert, explaining the new stop would necessitate upgrades to stretches of rail and the signal system.
Englert said such improvements along the length of the track are the key to increasing commuter rides, which is the goal of the CMAQ grant. Amtrak is hung up in litigation with track owner Guilford Transportation Co., which argues the track is too fragile to accommodate a plan to increase the Downeaster?s approved speed from 60 mph to 79 between Portland and Plaistow.
Regardless, Englert said poor infrastructure in places such as Kennebunk, Maine, and Plaistow, along with crowded railways in Haverhill and Lawrence, Mass., prevent the train from even reaching 50 mph in those areas.
“It?s a very cluttered, congested corridor for rail,” he said.
North Station is nearly three hours from Portland and 1:15 from Exeter on the Amtrak line, and increasing the speed would make the Downeaster a more attractive commuter option.
“It?s a good, basic service, but it?s not really oriented toward commuters,” Bogle said.
“The next step is for us to improve,” Englert said.
That means not only picking up the train?s pace but also adding stops at the existing stations, which in turn means adding actual train sets and parallel tracks. Currently, only one legitimate commuter train leaves Exeter at 7:33 a.m. and arrives at North Station at 8:50 a.m. One option is to run a second train between Dover and Boston to meet the high demand in southern New Hampshire, but Englert said that?s a long way off.
“There?s only so much you can do when you?ve got one track,” he said. “We can?t really put too many more trains on a one-track railroad.”
Ruben Gaztambide, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, uses the Downeaster to commute to and from Phillips Exeter Academy, where he?s conducting an ethnographic study of the student experience. Gaztambide relies on the quiet ride – interrupted only once, he said, as fans traveled to a Bruins game – to get some work done. The inflexible schedule, which has trains bound from Exeter to Boston five times daily, is his only complaint.
“It has always been on time – sometimes painfully on time because I?ve had to run to it.”