(The Philadelphia Inquirer posted the following story by Chris Mondics on its website on July 9.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Every day, Jetta Johnson says she wakes up praying that another business in this tiny prairie town just beneath the snow-capped spires of the northern Rockies won’t close.
Time was when Cut Bank was a boomtown, rolling in oil money and fat profits earned by prosperous local ranchers and wheat farmers. The town even had a 24-hour restaurant. But the oil wells are running dry, its refineries and many of its downtown businesses are gone, and a five-year drought has hammered the farmers, leading to a slow but steady exodus of its people.
Now, as if the outflow of jobs and people weren’t enough, Cut Bank and other struggling towns on the northern plains are facing another calamity. It could lose the train service so vital to connecting this remote, windswept town to the rest of the world.
Within a few weeks, the Bush administration is expected to present a plan that could result in the breakup of Amtrak, turning over costly long-distance trains serving places like Cut Bank to the states. Critics say the proposal, if approved by Congress, would spell doom for many if not all of Amtrak’s 16 long-distance lines. These critics worry that states in no position to take up the slack would discontinue service.
For many of the towns along the Empire Builder line, which runs from Chicago, through Cut Bank and on to Seattle and Portland, the train provides their only public transportation.
“It would be the death knell for the long-distance lines,” and one more economic blow for the towns along those lines, Rep. Dennis R. Rehberg, a Republican from Montana, said of the administration’s approach to Amtrak. “If it had not been for the government helping us financially with the railroads in the first place, the West would never have been settled.”
An Amtrak breakup also could have a negative impact on heavily traveled service into and out of Philadelphia and other cities on the Northeast Corridor. That’s because members of Congress representing regions that lose Amtrak would be much less likely to vote for service in the Northeast if their own train service were eliminated.
“Why would my boss vote for service [on the Northeast Corridor] if they cut the Empire Builder?” said an aide to Sen. Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat. “He wants to do what is right for passenger rail [in general] but he also wants to do what is right for Montana.”
The Bush administration says Amtrak has been frozen in time. While other transportation systems like airlines have been forced to adjust to changing travel patterns and economic conditions, Amtrak’s routes have changed little in its 30 years of existence, and it’s time for a fresh approach.
“I have no illusion that it [the Bush administration proposal] will be met with ticker tape,” said Allan Rutter, the federal railroad administrator.
Conservative policy analysts such as Ron Utt, a senior researcher at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, say money saved by cutting Amtrak service might be put to better use, perhaps by providing low-income residents with subsidies for airplane tickets.
Amtrak’s long-distance trains, he says, are “highly questionable. They have no social value. There are plenty of substitutes that are far more cost-effective.”
If the Amtrak long lines are on hard times, it was hard to tell aboard the Empire Builder one recent afternoon. As the packed train, equipped with sleeping compartments, pulled out of the station in Chicago, it carried a colorful array of cross-country travelers – ranchers, vacationers, college students and retirees. Its dining car, with waiters and a wine list, was filled to capacity at mealtimes.
So too was the viewing car, with its cushioned swivel chairs and wide expanses of glass for viewing the passing countryside, an especially prized spot as the train passes through the Rockies. A day and a half after leaving Chicago, the train reached Cut Bank, where only two passengers got off, a reporter and a Swedish geologist.
Residents of remote Montana towns like Cut Bank, East Glacier, Havre and Shelby say Amtrak provides one of the few reliable links to the outside world. In winter, heavy snows and temperatures that plunge to near 40 below (Cut Bank bills itself as the coldest town in America) often make the roads impassable. The nearest commercial airport is a two-hour drive away in Great Falls. But, because of the region’s isolation and low passenger traffic, airfares are high.
Joni Wolstad, a rancher who lives in nearby East Glacier, recalls the day heavy snows blocked the roads to Cut Bank 50 miles away, keeping her from filling a prescription for a flaring gum infection. Her husband rode out to the rail line on horseback and picked up the prescription from a friend, who had brought it out on the train from Cut Bank.
Wolstad lives a life of rural isolation that most urban Americans can barely imagine. Her ranch backs up to some of the wildest country in the northern Rockies. Wolstad said she used to take her dog into the garden to warn her if a grizzly bear was nearby – until a grizzly made off with the dog a while back.
Only about 2,000 persons get on and off the train each year in Cut Bank, a tiny ridership compared with Philadelphia, which serves about 10,000 Amtrak customers every day at 30th Street Station. But, if Cut Bank is to have any hope of attracting new employers it must be able to show that it has reliable public transportation, says Joni Stewart, the director of a local development agency.
“If Amtrak were to pull out, that would be one less thing that we would be able to point out to employers,” Stewart says.
Things have been up and down in Cut Bank ever since Meriwether Lewis led a search party up Cut Bank Creek nearly 200 years ago, only to find that it did not flow to the rich fur-bearing regions of the Canadian Rockies, as he had hoped.
The town was developed by the railroad as a supply depot for its steam engines. Later oil was discovered.
But with the oil giving out, population declined. Since the late 1960s, when the town reached a peak of 4,000 people, Cut Bank has lost almost 1,000 people.
Despite these discouraging turns, the town has shown amazing resilience and an ability to pull together, a trait that locals trace back to Cut Bank’s homesteading heritage.
It is commonplace for residents to raise $20,000 or more over a weekend to help a neighbor hit with huge medical bills. Every spring, far-flung farm families gather on one another’s ranches for picnics to celebrate the branding of calves, a tonic for the isolation of life on the remote high prairie.
A nearby Indian reservation pumps cash into the town’s remaining stores. Five colonies of Hutterites, a German speaking-sect that shares its religious roots with Mennonites and Quakers, also provide a boost by buying from farm equipment dealers.
Fares on the Empire Builder don’t come close to supporting the cost of the service. But rail defenders denounce such yardsticks, noting that government subsidies for highways and airline travel are much greater.
Elliot Sklar, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University, says that if the federal government were to eliminate long-distance routes like the Empire Builder, the savings would be minimal. That’s because many of the costs for infrastructure would remain. Moreover, turning the lines over to private operators, as the Bush administration has urged, could undermine safety, as it did in Britain when rail lines were privatized there in the 1990s.
But for the Rev. Michael E. Collins, pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Cut Bank, the reasons for keeping the twice-daily train service to Cut Bank are more personal.
“It is quite literally a lifeline,” he said. “You drive all over this county and you see grain elevators that are not functioning, houses that are abandoned. There are a lot of towns that would dry up [if Amtrak service ended].”