(The following story by Katie Campbell appeared on the Fort Pierce Tribune website on January 15.)
INDIAN RIVER COUNTY, Fla. — Expanding a passenger rail service along Florida’s East Coast isn’t on any current Amtrak priority list, an Amtrak spokesman said Wednesday.
“The last list of potential new routes (that included the Florida East Coast project) was developed under a previous (Amtrak) president and board years ago,” Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said.
“Our board’s first priority now is to finish years and years of deferred maintenance and to get out of the hole we’re in.”
The expansion project, first proposed in 2000, would have rerouted the New York-Miami Silver Star train, connecting it to the Florida East Coast Railway, establishing a twice-daily, 70 mph tourist train service with stops in most cities from Jacksonville to Miami, including Vero Beach, Fort Pierce and Stuart.
A $60 million state grant largely would have paid for the $82.5 million needed to upgrade the rails and build new stations and platforms in cities along the route, said Nazih Haddad, Florida Department of Transportation Passenger Rail Department manager. Amtrak would cover the rest and furnish the trains.
Amtrak officials originally said the line would be finished in 2002.
“We felt like it would be a viable project at the time,” said Vero Beach Mayor Sandra Bowden, who helped lobby for state funding of the project in 2001. “We were looking forward to movement on it, but it looks like it’s stagnated at this point.”
The project derailed when Amtrak rolled into financial trouble in 2002.
A $200 million federal emergency loan issued in June 2002 kept Amtrak from having to cut existing routes, but so far none of that loan has been paid back, Magliari said. Conditions of the loan prohibit Amtrak from expanding additional routes.
And Amtrak still isn’t meeting its current funding needs since Congress hasn’t allocated what Amtrak requested for 2003 and 2004, he said. For fiscal year 2003, Amtrak officials asked for $1.2 billion and received $1.05 billion. For 2004, they asked for $1.8 billion, but Congress has listed proposed allocations at about $1.2 billion.
“Until we know for certain, it’s hard for us to determine how much work we can do,” Magliari said.