(The following story by Brad Cooper appeared on The Kansas City Star website on September 8, 2009.)
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Riding Amtrak across Missouri has been as reliable as a coin flip in recent years.
Sometimes you were on time. Sometimes you weren’t. And sometimes you were many hours late. But now it’s a trip that might be worth betting your time on.
Amtrak trains between Kansas City and St. Louis are running on time more frequently this year than they have since October 2006.
They have been on schedule more than 90 percent of the time, compared with years when 70 percent might be considered good on-time performance.
“The time has been much, much better,” said Amtrak rider Shelia Wright from Kansas City. “I can live with an occasional delay, but when it happens on every trip it’s pretty disturbing.”
There have been months in recent years when one of every three trains was late, largely because they share track used by large volumes of freight trains.
Wright said there were times when a trip from Kansas City to Jefferson City would take six hours, almost twice as long as it should have taken. There was a notorious example from 2006 when a trip from Kansas City to St. Louis took 12 1/2 hours.
On-time performance has been one of the chief issues besetting Missouri passenger rail service. It led to declines in ridership even as a record number of passengers boarded Amtrak trains across the country.
“Delays were bad,” said Amtrak passenger Stephen Cart of Kansas City. “It was almost to the point it was ridiculous.”
The lack of reliability frustrated Missouri transportation officials who constantly went back to the General Assembly to ask for money to subsidize the service. More than once, money for Amtrak was almost cut from the state budget.
“It was not a service we were proud of,” said Brian Weiler, who oversees Amtrak service for the Missouri Department of Transportation.
But in the first six months of this year, Amtrak has been running on schedule better than 90 percent of the time. In June, 97 percent of the trains ran on time — arriving within 30 minutes of their scheduled arrival. It dropped to 90 percent in July.
But Amtrak service has not been without hitches. In the spring, Amtrak used buses to get around rail construction on the tracks that Union Pacific owns and shares with Amtrak.
Still, the turnaround has amazed rail planners at the department, which subsidizes the service at a cost of $9 million this year.
Ridership has started to rebound, beating 150,000 for the year ending June 30. It was the first time Amtrak’s Missouri service hit 150,000 since 2005-06 when more than 174,000 passengers boarded Amtrak trains.
Cart returned to riding Amtrak this year. He was stunned by the improvement. “I considered it remarkable. It was right on time. I was impressed.”
Just the first step
Interviews with officials at Amtrak, Union Pacific and the Missouri department gave several reasons for the dramatic turnaround in performance:
• Completion of a new bridge across the Gasconade River between Jefferson City and St. Louis. The new bridge, which opened in October, added a second track across the river, eliminating a bottleneck.
• Millions spent on track maintenance have reduced delays caused when trains have to run at slow speeds because of poor track conditions.
• Improved dispatching by Union Pacific that better moves Amtrak passenger trains around freight traffic. There had been some disagreement between Union Pacific and the state over whether the railroad had given passenger trains priority over freight trains as is required by federal law.
• Congress passed a new law last year giving federal authorities the power to investigate and fine freight railroads for not giving priority to passenger trains.
Improving service reliability was just the first step to shortening the scheduled 5 1/2 hours it should take to get from Kansas City to St. Louis, possibly by moving to a high-speed rail.
“You can’t really build on failure,” Weiler said. “I don’t know that you can jump from a service that has poor reliability all the way to high-speed rail.”
Amtrak trains run at an average speed of about 40 mph, although they are authorized to run at speeds up to 79 mph.
Missouri would like to get that up to 90 mph in some segments of the route, but Weiler doubted that Amtrak would run at speeds higher than 125 mph in the near future.
“It will be incremental improvements,” he said.
The state already is building a new 9,000-foot siding in California, Mo., which will allow trains to pass each other. The new siding is expected to relieve one of the biggest bottlenecks on the 283-mile route.
Pushing for more
Missouri is going after $200 million in rail improvements from federal stimulus money set aside for a national high-speed rail network.
About $56 million would go for adding a second track between Lee’s Summit and Pleasant Hill so train speeds could increase to 90 mph. Some $34 million more would go toward a second rail bridge over the Osage River to relieve congestion.
“Just getting up to the point that we’re able to run the trains at the authorized speed would be a vast improvement over where we were before,” Weiler said.
Competition for the high-speed rail money is going to be intense. There’s only $8 billion available and more than $100 billion is being requested.
Some experts said Missouri has a good chance to secure some stimulus money because it is part of a coalition of 10 Midwestern states that promotes improved passenger train service, including high-speed rail.
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has promoted the idea of high-speed rail, noting that the rail coalition has been working on passenger rail service for more than a decade.
RIDERSHIP
2008-09: 153,482
2007-08: 137,713
2006-07: 144,312
2005-06: 174,513
2004-05: 171,410
2003-04: 162,446