(The following article by Tom Long was posted on the Boston Globe website on January 11.)
BOSTON — If you build it, they will come. And they did. Five years after the Downeaster began daily train service from Portland, Maine, to Boston, the rail line is a big success.
“Ridership was up 22.9 percent last year, the largest growth in Amtrak,” Downeaster spokeswoman Patricia Douglas said last week.
The train makes four trips daily to Boston with stops in Durham and Exeter, N.H., and Haverhill. Last year, 333,800 rode the train. Ridership from Durham to Boston increased 61 percent from October 2005 to October 2006 alone, from 22,000 to 35,000 riders.
But ridership is not the only way to gauge the success of the rail line. “It’s been a catalyst for development,” said Douglas.
Late last month, Haverhill officials announced that the city would use a state “smart growth “tool known as Chapter 40R, which encourages development near train stations, to help developers transform several old mills in the city into an urban village of shops and residences at a cost of about $68 million.
“It’s difficult to determine how much the success of the Downeaster contributed to the development, but it certainly was part of the equation,” Haverhill Mayor James J. Fiorentini said last week.
Douglas said the success of the Downeaster has led to a proposal to create a “classic transit-oriented mixed-use development” in the mills in Saco, Maine, the construction of two hotels in Old Orchard Beach in Maine, and even the expansion of an ice cream shop near the train station in Durham. “I think the developers were waiting for a few years to see what happened,” she said. “Now they know the ridership is there and that we’re going to be around for a long time.”