The excursion train about to leave Middlebury. Photo by C.B. Hall/VTDigger
Nearly 80 lawmakers, state officials and friends of passenger railroading took something of a victory lap Thursday with an excursion on a vintage train from Middlebury to Burlington’s Union Station and back.
The journey was to commemorate the state’s recent receipt of $10 million in federal funds to groom the Rutland-Burlington Western Rail Corridor for an extension of Amtrak’s New York-Rutland Ethan Allen Express to the Queen City.
The Vermont Rail System (VRS), which provides freight service on the state-owned corridor, furnished the excursion train – a locomotive and four cars reconfigured from 80-year-old commuter coaches originally used in New Jersey. A cash bar anchored the on-board celebration, while, in another car, a guitarist and tenor saxophonist offered musical accompaniment, the sax’s notes uncannily akin to the locomotive’s blasts as the train lumbered through a gray November landscape.
The event’s sponsor, the Vermont Rail Action Network (VRAN) advocacy group, used the train’s three-hour layover at Burlington’s Union Station for the organization’s annual dinner and meeting, where Agency of Transportation (VTrans) Secretary Chris Cole offered keynote remarks. Preceding him, speakers including representatives of Amtrak and VRS, were incandescent over the prospects for passenger rail’s return to the city.
The interior of one of the rail cars, vintage about 1935. Photo by C.B. Hall/VTDigger
“I can’t wait to see this place full of passengers,” Bill Hollister, Amtrak’s principal officer for policy and development, told the 150 on hand.
“We are really looking forward to having Amtrak right out there,” VRS chief financial officer Mary Ann Michaels chimed in, gesturing at the tracks behind her.
The $10 million grant from the federal Transportation Infrastructure Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program fell $2 million shy of the state’s request. In a post-meeting interview, Cole said that the application assumed a state matching appropriation of $11 million, and that the Legislature will therefore be asked to appropriate up to $13 million to complete the $26 million package of improvements, which will also utilize $3 million of highway funding for upgrades to road crossings. The rail funding will underwrite the replacement of old, jointed rail with lower-maintenance continuous welded rail on 11 miles of the route, as well as other enhancements, to allow passenger trains to travel at up to 59 mph.
The corridor’s 67 miles have not seen a through passenger service since 1953, when the Rutland Railroad discontinued its last passenger train on the route. A commuter train between Charlotte and Burlington, inaugurated by then-governor Howard Dean, lasted from 2000-2003, when his successor, Jim Douglas, ended the little-patronized service.
On board the train for the entire excursion, Rep. Herb Russell, D-Rutland, the Legislature’s leading passenger rail advocate, expressed confidence that he and his colleagues would appropriate the full state share, even if it rises to $13 million. Rep. Patrick Brennan, R-Colchester, chair of the House Transportation Committee, agreed.
“Our commitment has been so strong in the last couple of years that we’d be missing the boat if we didn’t continue the mission and complete the [Western] Corridor,” he said in an interview following the meeting.
“We got [the grant] because we demonstrated we were able to pony up some real dollars,” he concluded, referring to the extremely competitive federal grant process.
No one with whom VTDigger spoke on the train or at the meeting predicted any significant political opposition to the state funding for the line’s upgrade.
Agency of Transportation Secretary Chris Cole addresses the meeting at Burlington’s Union Station. Photo by C.B. Hall/VTDigger
In his speech, Cole said that Gov. Peter Shumlin “has given us a clear direction. There are two trains we want to extend: the Vermonter to Montreal, and the Ethan Allen Express to Burlington.”
Cole said the grant would require the state to finish the project by mid-2020, and that service would commence sometime after that “at the latest.”
“I’d love to have it done sooner, but I really need to sit down with my staff and talk about all the elements,” which include his agency’s cash management, he said. “It’s premature to put a date on when the service will start.”
Cole said the train’s only certain stop between Rutland and Burlington will be Middlebury, while Vergennes is “likely,” and Brandon “has made requests.” He declined to elaborate on the prospects for Brandon.
He did, however, clarify public statements he has made about building, in conjunction with the other upgrades, a wye track — a triangular configuration of rails for turning a train around — in Burlington. Asked if the money for building the wye might be better spent on upgrading the 8 miles of track from Burlington to Essex Junction, and then taking the train to an existing wye and servicing facility in St. Albans, he said VTrans had not finalized the wye’s location.
“That’s in play,” he put it.
“I can’t envision where you could put a wye [in Burlington],” veteran rail activist Carl Fowler of Williston said. “The only reasonable location would be the existing wye in Essex Junction,” he mentioned another possibility, “or going up to St. Albans.”
The meeting audience included two representatives of Iowa Pacific Holdings, a Chicago-based company which recently took over some aspects of operating the Hoosier State, an Amtrak train that runs between Chicago and Indianapolis with attractively rehabbed vintage cars.
In an interview before last month’s announcement of the TIGER grant for Vermont, IPH president Ed Ellis said, “We’re just keeping on eye on [the Western Rail Corridor]. We might be an option that [the state of Vermont] would be interested in.” Neither of the IPH representatives responded to phone messages seeking comment on the prospects ushered in by the grant.
Whatever the enthusiasm expressed by Amtrak’s Hollister, the national rail provider leaves initiatives for expanding shorter-distance services like the Ethan Allen to the state, or states, that underwrite almost all of their operating deficits. Under federal law, private operation of some aspects of passenger service is an option.
Amtrak’s prevailing practice meanwhile leaves the construction and maintenance of new stations to the communities seeking service: they have to cobble together the considerable funding needed as they can. The process can take years, and millions of dollars. The Western Corridor project’s $26 million total includes $4.4 million for platforms, but not for other station infrastructure, according to Costa Pappis, transportation planning coordinator at VTrans.
The sign in the center of Middlebury awaits a train. Photo by C.B. Hall/VTDigger
Dean George, who chairs Middlebury’s selectboard, said that “no definite decision” had yet been made about how to fund or even where to put his town’s station, but that “we’ve been very supportive of passenger rail service, particularly with Middlebury College and the number of students that would use it.”
Middlebury’s Gov. Jim Douglas who pulled the plug on the Charlotte-Burlington train, has expressed his support for “intercity service that could serve commuters as well”on the Rutland-Burlington alignment.
The Thursday excursion began and ended at the old rail depot, now privately owned, on Middlebury’s Seymour Street. A short distance away, at Seymour Street’s intersection with Main Street, a sign like those seen near Amtrak stations around the country directed travelers to the depot. According to Fowler, the sign appeared in the late 1990s, when it was installed by the private operator of a short-lived tourist rail service.
For a decade and a half, Middlebury has simply left the sign in place, as if to express the hope of one day seeing the train that Thursday’s excitement was all about.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Officials all aboard Western Rail Corridor project.
