(The following editorial appeared on the Great Falls Tribune website on November 15.)
GREAT FALLS, Mont. — After years — decades, actually — of underfunding the nation’s passenger rail service, it looks as if Congress is on the verge of doing right by Amtrak.
The 36-year-old national rail service was created by Congress at a time when passenger routes and entire railroads were heading into the scrap heap of history.
Since that time, it has been an almost annual struggle by the quasi-public corporation to stay ahead of the creditors.
If Amtrak said it needed $1.5 billion, there would be a big fight in Congress, and the lawmakers in the last days of a session would appropriate, say, $900 million.
As a result, service suffered, equipment suffered, employees suffered, and, most important, Amtrak passengers suffered.
Over decades when billions upon billions of dollars were pumped into air travel and highway infrastructure, passenger trains were left to fight for scraps.
Now, however, as gasoline goes for $3.25 and air travel is costly, crowded and increasingly unpleasant, rail travel is looking better and better.
And the Senate agrees. Last week it approved a six-year program that would end Amtrak’s year-to-year, hand-to-mouth existence and replace it with a 40 percent increase — to $1.4 billion a year. It’s still not enough to get really serious about rail travel, but it’s a good start.
Amtrak generates roughly $2 billion of its own revenue each year, and it’s on a track to generate even more. Ridership has increased five years in a row, including in the crowded Boston-to-Washington, D.C., corridor, where more people now ride the train than fly on airlines.
All of that suggests that the time is ripe for investing in rail — as virtually all other developed nations do.
There’s an extra plus in all this for Montana.
In addition to ensuring continued service on Montana’s Hi-Line, where Amtrak’s daily Empire Builder is the only public transportation available, the bill passed by the Senate includes money that could open the door to returning service across the southern part of the state. That route, the North Coast Hiawatha, was abandoned in its entirety in 1979.
The Senate-passed measure offers up to $1.4 billion in matching grants to states that want more passenger service. And Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., inserted language to require Amtrak to consider reinstating the old Hiawatha.
The Montana-Wyoming Association of Railroad Passengers would settle for a partial reinstatement: Missoula-to-Billings service, with a connecting line running from Billings to Shelby — through Great Falls.
We like that idea, for obvious reasons.
The bill now goes to the House where Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., has always been a supporter of Amtrak.
The House should pass or even add to the Senate bill, and the president should sign it.