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Tuesday, 9:18 a.m.: The train arrives at the Alton station on time, and a
mother, cradling her baby, boards. Once seated, she pounds on the window.
The clamor interrupts an elderly couple’s card game and wakes the man
across the aisle. On the platform below, Grandma waves goodbye. Welcome aboard the northbound Texas Eagle, one of
five Amtrak passenger trains that now offer daily service between St. Louis
and Chicago. Since departing St. Louis 45 minutes earlier, the Eagle has
lumbered by rusty steel mills and oil refineries that parallel the
Mississippi River. From here, the train gathers speed across the Illinois
prairie, flashing by furrowed farm fields, grain elevators, and orchards on
its way to Springfield. In an hour, it arrives in the capital city. The sound of the baby crying is free. The cost of the
trip: $12. More than 3 million travelers bought Amtrak tickets
to or from Illinois destinations last year, according to the Illinois
Department of Transportation. The agency estimates that monthly ridership
on state-sponsored trains on the Chicago-St. Louis runs grew by nearly 50
percent between November 2005 and November 2006. That increase is due to
the $24 million appropriated by the Illinois Legislature, which doubled the
state’s allocation last year. The added money funded two more daily
trains on the route. It also increased service on other downstate routes by
adding one train between Chicago and Quincy and another between Chicago and
Carbondale. Under a bipartisan proposal put forward last week in
the U.S. Senate, Illinois passenger rail service may continue to surge. Legislation sponsored by U.S. Sens. Frank Lautenberg,
D-N.J., and Trent Lott, R-Miss., would allocate $3.2 billion annually to
support Amtrak over the next six years. Approximately $300 million a year
would be earmarked to provide federal matching funds to encourage states to
invest in Amtrak. In its last session, the Senate passed a similar bill,
93-6, but it died in the House of Representatives. The bill’s chance
of passage has been greatly enhanced now that Democrats control both houses
of Congress. If passed, the federal matching funds would allow
Illinois to upgrade tracks and make other infrastructure improvements
necessary for more efficient passenger rail service. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, a co-sponsor of the bill, last
week talked to Amtrak president and CEO Alex Kummant to press for future
federal funding of Illinois passenger routes, including proposals to extend
service to Rock Island, Peoria, and the Quad Cities. “Amtrak provides quick, cost-effective, and
reliable public ground transportation to 30 [Illinois] communities,”
Durbin says. “We need to add the communities in northwest and
north-central Illinois to that list.”
Durbin is a member of the Senate Transportation
Appropriations Subcommittee and a longtime supporter of passenger rail
service. More important, he’s now the No. 2 leader in the
Democratic-controlled Senate. But a favorable political climate isn’t the
only thing helping Amtrak along. High fuel prices are making passenger rail
service popular again. “[Amtrak] gives people another option to
get around other than pay gasoline prices, which could ricochet from $2 to
$3.50 [a gallon] in the course of a year,” says Marc Magliari, an
Amtrak spokesman. Richard Harnish, executive director of the Midwest
High Speed Rail Association, in Chicago, is tickled by the sudden change in
Amtrak’s fortunes.
“It’s very exciting that the senators
have chosen to make this such a priority,” he says. Harnish estimates
that the extra federal funding would permit improvements that could shave
almost two hours off Amtrak’s current Chicago-St. Louis schedule,
cutting the elapsed time for the 282-mile trip down to three hours and
forty-five minutes. But those figures still pale compared with the
efficiency of government-subsidized passenger rail service elsewhere in the
world. High-speed electric trains in Europe, for instance, have traveled at
averages of 120 mph and more for decades. A French train set the world
record of 321 mph in 1990. By contrast, IDOT rules mandate that Amtrak
trains between Chicago and St. Louis not exceed 110 mph. With the exception
of an improved section from Springfield to Mazonia in Grundy County,
however, track conditions prevent the maintenance of that speed. North of
Dwight, Ill., the speed limit is set at 79 mph. The trains are also
required to travel at much lower speeds in the Chicago and St. Louis
metropolitan areas. “There are a lot of people all over the
country that recognize that we have to have high-quality passenger trains
in order for us to be competitive,” Harnish says. “We’re
going to hurt because we’re not doing this in this country.
It’s going to hurt very soon.”
The chief drawback to achieving a high-speed rail
system in the United States has nothing to do with technology, Harnish
says. “It has to do with a lack of commitment to make it happen.
It’s all about getting our political leaders to make a commitment to
do what’s necessary to keep our country competitive. “We had trains radiating out from Chicago
that went faster than 100 mph in all directions . . . in 1936.”
C ongress created the National Railroad Passenger
Corp., otherwise known as Amtrak, in 1970 to take over the unprofitable
passenger services that private freight railroads were then obligated to
offer. By the 1960s, ridership had plummeted as a result of competition
from the auto and aviation fields, which both benefited from hefty federal
subsidies of one sort or another. In the beginning, Amtrak acted as a
makeshift life-support system for an anemic mode of public transportation.
To stem the hemorrhage of dollars, it immediately slashed more than half of
the existing passenger routes that had previously been maintained by the
freight railroads. By default, the federal government had become the
owner of a hobbled national passenger rail service — but the
government didn’t own the tracks on which its trains operated. Under
the new arrangement, Amtrak paid the privately held railroads for access to
their rights of way. The same system remains in place today. In fiscal
2005, for example, Amtrak paid six participating private freight carriers
$92 million for the use of their tracks. That figure represents only a tad
of the annual combined revenues of the participating freight lines. After
being relieved of their debt-ridden passenger services, the railroads felt
no responsibility to give them the green light over their profitable
freight operations. Amtrak’s concerns were literally and
metaphorically sidetracked. Timetables became wish lists. Over the long
haul, passenger service lurched along from one congressional appropriation
to the next. Outside the heavily traveled Northeastern corridor, the
upgrading of tracks to passenger standards was more an exception than a
rule. But there is another reason for the slow travel times
between Chicago and St. Louis, and it predates Amtrak’s inception by
more than a century. Much of the route, now owned by Union Pacific, follows
a right of way created in the middle of the 19th century. Originally
chartered in 1847 as the Alton & Sangamon Railroad, its builders never
envisioned their railway serving St. Louis. Instead, the line linked the
fledgling Illinois capital of Springfield with the then-prosperous
Mississippi River port of Alton. After the railroad was extended northward,
the owners changed its name to the Chicago & Alton Railroad. As a
result, Chicago-St. Louis passenger trains in the 21st century still creep
to and from Alton on a maze of intersecting tracks that serve freight yards
on the east side of the Mississippi. Efforts to improve the antiquated system have been
stopped dead on the tracks for years. In 1992, the U.S. Department of Transportation
officially designated the Chicago-St. Louis route a high-speed-rail
corridor. Through Durbin’s efforts, Congress allocated $500,000 to
study the project. The next year, the Clinton administration backed the
high-speed-rail corridor. Durbin then said that the plan could make rail
travel twice as fast as driving a car between the two cities and half as
expensive as taking a plane. If the proposal received funding and moved
forward without any hitches, Durbin said, the system could be operational
as early as 1997. It’s been 10 years, and passengers are still
waiting at the station for high-speed train travel to arrive in Illinois.
First, President Bill Clinton reversed his position, choosing to derail the
high-speed-rail plan in favor of balancing the budget. Then the project
suffered further delays after the Republicans took control of Congress.
Nonetheless, Durbin remained supportive of the idea. Illinois allocated
state money to help maintain existing service while using its limited
federal funds to make track improvement, study grade-crossing safety, and
prepare an environmental-impact statement. By 2003, it appeared that the state’s efforts
were for naught. That’s when the Bush administration began pushing a
proposal to dismantle the entire national passenger rail system by cutting
off all federal funding. The Bush plan would have eliminated Amtrak’s
long-distance routes and shifted much of the remaining financial burden to
the states. But even the then-Republican-led Congress couldn’t agree
on such a drastic move, and the House voted down the measure on a voice
vote in 2005. As it stands, federal funding has not been adequate
to support the level of service deemed necessary by some states. At last
count, 14 states, including Illinois, pay for a portion of Amtrak’s
operating expenses within their borders. “If the state wasn’t paying us to operate
these trains, they wouldn’t operate,” says Magliari, the Amtrak
spokesman. “All you would have is two trains between Chicago and St.
Louis, not five. You’d have no service to Quincy. You’d have
one train between Chicago and Carbondale.”
Illinois is second only to California in its
allocations. The state government is hoping that its investments will soon
be matched by the grants that are part of the Amtrak bill introduced in the
Senate last week. “We’ve been doing this for at least 20
years,” says Matt Vanover, an IDOT spokesman. “It’s something you will see more states
move toward, but as they [Congress] begin to debate this we would certainly
hope that they would take into account those previous investments taken by
states that have [already] partnered with Amtrak.”
T uesday, 6:10 p.m.: The southbound Texas Eagle is about a half-hour out of
Springfield. In the dining car, a passenger from San Antonio
strikes up a conversation with a stranger who shares her table. Her
counterpart is a pro boxer turned trainer. He’s heading for Killeen,
Texas, to prepare two up-and-coming fighters for bouts in Miami that will
air on cable TV in March. These two passengers appear to have nothing in common
but the time of their dinner reservations and the way in which they have
chosen to travel. The two swap Amtrak horror stories. They complain about
the food. She grouses about the surly disposition of a crew member. But it’s clear from their appetites and their
presence that they appreciate the cuisine and the train’s
accommodations more than they let on. He reminisces about his glory days.
She tells a tale about the commercial airline pilot in the sleeping
compartment across from hers who keeps asking dumb questions because
he’s never been on train before. They share a laugh at the
aviator’s expense. Outside, the lights of Carlinville flicker by. The engineer sounds his horn in the inky darkness of
a winter evening. Next station stop, Alton. Alton, Illinois.
C.D. Stelzer is a St. Louis-based freelance writer
and frequent contributor to Illinois Times.
This article appears in Jan 18-24, 2007.
