(The following story by Steve Everly appeared on The Kansas City Star website on December 8.)
KANSAS CITY — A fledging effort to begin passenger train service between Kansas City and Dallas got its first local airing Saturday.
The Northern Flyer Alliance, a volunteer group, is pushing a plan that would expand Amtrak train service that currently operates from Oklahoma City to Dallas. The plan, discussed at a public meeting in Kansas City’s Union Station, would have daily train service between Kansas City and Dallas beginning in 2010. Its stops would include Wichita.
“This is a civic initiative,” said Mark Corriston, the alliance’s Kansas City director.
The expanded route would travel in part over rails that are already used by Amtrak trains traveling to the West Coast. But at Newton, Kan., the new train service to Dallas would turn south and continue on tracks now used by BNSF Railway for its freight trains.
A major obstacle, however, is funding. The Kansas City-to-Dallas route would require, by alliance estimates, $12.7 million in annual funding to cover operations and about $6.5 million in upgrades before the service could start. That money would not come from Amtrak, but from the states in which the trains travel.
Oklahoma and Texas already pay for the current service from Oklahoma City to Dallas, and Kansas would have to chip in $5.9 million annually and pay for part of the upgrades. Federal funding, if legislation now in Congress becomes law, might pay for some of the cost.
The Kansas Department of Transportation earlier this year asked Amtrak to study the proposed Kansas City-to-Dallas route, including calculating its own estimate of how much it would cost.
Saturday’s meeting was attended by about a dozen people, including local government officials. Some said that they were intrigued by the idea of the Kansas City-to-Dallas service but that it was too early to say if it would happen. More work, including nailing down the funding at a time of tight budgets for such projects, is needed.
“It’s still preliminary,” said Marge Vogt, a member of the Olathe City Council and chairwoman of MARC’s Total Transportation Policy Board.
For more information about the proposed train route, go to www.northflyer.org