All aboard? | Supporters say expanding passenger rail service in Maine makes perfect sense, but skeptics counter transportation funding is desperately needed elsewhere
It'll be the Grand Central Station of Brunswick, explains Mat Eddy, the town's economic development director. Maine Street Station — 130,000 sq. ft. of retail therapy, office space, a hotel and a park, anchored by a station for Amtrak's Downeaster train — is expected to bring between 32,000 and 76,000 people in 2010 to the lower end of Maine Street, a part of town that's often overlooked by tourists. Eddy stands on a recent sunny day on the four-acre brownfield site where JHR Development, a Marblehead, Mass., company with an office in Brunswick, is scheduled to break ground on the project in July. Dressed in a black leather jacket, black ball cap pulled low, Eddy is coolly confident Brunswick will become the next success story in southern Maine's rail revival. "The reality is, it's sort of a 'build it and they will come' kind of thing," Eddy says. "That's what we expect."
In perhaps the state's most dramatic testament to the power of a gubernatorial promise, Brunswick is going ahead with the $27 million project on this stretch of town-owned land without actually knowing for sure if the train will ever arrive. The Legislature recently passed almost $3 million in annual funding to pay interest on a $31.5 million federal loan to ready 28 miles of privately owned track between Portland and Brunswick for passenger rail, but it didn't secure the $7 million to $9 million annually to keep the Downeaster running, to Brunswick or anywhere else in Maine, when its federal subsidy expires in July 2009. No worries, though, Eddy maintains, because Gov. John Baldacci has promised the money will be part of the next budget.
Betting lots of money and time on only the prospect of passenger rail has always been the modus operandi of Maine's modern train revival, at least in the southern part of the state where finding new and better ways to travel to and from the traffic snarl of Boston is an immediate concern for leisure and business travelers. In the early 1990s, when the movement to bring Amtrak to Portland began in earnest, the principal grassroots rallying group, TrainRiders/Northeast, was promised by state and federal officials the Downeaster would arrive in June 1993. From there, rail enthusiasts envisioned a rapid expansion into central and coastal Maine that would soon revive the some 1,100 miles of freight track in the state for simultaneous passenger rail use. You could ride the rail from Portland through Bangor to Ellsworth, or from Lewiston to Montreal.
But the actual expansion of passenger rail proved to be much more difficult. The train failed to arrive in June 1993, and officials announced it would come six months later. When those six months had passed, the arrival day was pushed back another six months. The false starts, says TrainRiders head Wayne Davis, were caused by federal and state foot-dragging, internal reorganization at Amtrak and last-minute rescheduling to accommodate staffers' vacations. "It was like a dime-store novel," Davis recalls, "just confusion every day."
The Downeaster finally pulled into Portland on Dec. 14, 2001, and though the leg from Portland to Boston has since become one of Amtrak's most successful, it still does not make enough to support its operation, a fact that mystifies some critics of rail expansion.
But as gas prices inch close to $4 a gallon, rail is suddenly back on the policy map. Amtrak, long dogged by congressional funding cutbacks, in April told NBC Nightly News it would like to expand intercity services in places like Charlotte, N.C., Chicago and St. Louis because ridership is up 11% nationwide this year, thanks in part to fuel prices. But that plan would require Congress to roughly double the $1.3 billion it provides annually to the quasi-governmental rail authority, a hard sell considering Congress as recently as 2005 considered cutting funding altogether for a service then-Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta said "is dying and everyone knows it."
Cold, hard facts
There is a well known phrase train enthusiasts use to describe the sentimental obsession some have for old trains — "the romance of the rail." But romance, as any pragmatist will tell you, doesn't pay the bills, and advocates know passenger rail will thrive in Maine only if it helps the Maine economy.
"It's a very smart wave of the future," says Patricia Quinn, executive director of the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority, a quasi-governmental organization created by the Maine Legislature in 1995 to operate the Downeaster. "It has nothing to do with romance and history."
Quinn calls the Downeaster a transit option, just as buses or airplanes are, and says it should be subsidized as part of what she believes is wise public transportation policy.
"We need to diversify, other than just having transportation be highways," says Quinn. "Because as time goes on, and with gas prices going up like they are, it's important to invest in other means of transportation."
Indeed, it may be the death of the road that prompts the revival of the rail. In 2007, when fuel prices began to climb, the Downeaster attracted a record 383,833 passengers, and Quinn expects 2008 will be even better thanks to pain at the pump — she is projecting 418,000 people will take the two-and-a-quarter-hour ride to Boston this year. Due to rising demand, the service recently added a fifth daily trip to the schedule.
Quinn says none of Amtrak's passenger services anywhere in the country turn a profit, and as a public transportation service rail should be supported, as highways are, by dedicated revenue from taxes. To bolster the notion that rail is an economically important part of a public transit system, Quinn commissioned a report on the economic impact of the Downeaster. The March report found the Downeaster will generate $3.3 billion in new construction investment in the Portland to Boston corridor by 2030, creating 8,000 new jobs and contributing $55 million in state tax revenue. The report, by the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago, points to the two hotels and a $20 million residential and retail complex completed roughly 200 yards from the train station in Old Orchard Beach in 2006, and the $110 million mixed-use redevelopment of Saco mills currently underway that was prompted by plans to reopen the train station nearby. Extending the Downeaster to Brunswick and Rockland, the report claims, will create an additional $981 million in development, 2,582 new jobs and $16.5 million in annual taxes.
But Democratic Rep. Charles "Dusty" Fisher of Brewer isn't swayed by promises of increased wealth in parts of the state far from his constituency. A former employee of the now-defunct Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and a self-professed "big rail fan," Fisher nonetheless voted against expanding the Downeaster to Brunswick. Fisher, a member of the Legislature's Transportation Committee, made up his mind during a presentation before the committee in which he says proponents of the bill didn't mention anything about eastern Maine. Or western Maine. Or central. Or northern.
"It aggravated me," Fisher says. "It tells me that there's great desire to expand rail service because it's so important. But it's only important in southern Maine. The same people that voted for that [bill to expand the Downeaster] were the same people who voted [in 2005] to pull up the rail between Ellsworth and Calais. Same damn people."
If you want to talk statewide benefit, Fisher says, the state would be better off investing in aging freight rail track or roads and bridges.
"Putting $31 million into expanding passenger service which will never pay for itself, at a time when we've got hundreds and hundreds of roads that are in dire shape, I got a problem with that too," Fisher says.
Fisher has company in Augusta. While a $160 million bill to upgrade 264 bridges in Maine received near unanimous support in the House and passed under the hammer in the Senate, meaning there was no debate and no roll call vote, the bill to fund the Downeaster's expansion met with decidedly more resistance from Republicans and legislators of both parties who hail from rural areas throughout the state.
The bill to extend rail to Brunswick, which also passed under the hammer in the Senate, was successful in the House thanks to the chamber's Democratic majority but failed to get the nod from most Republicans and even some Democrats. Of the 139 voting representatives, 50 said no to funding Downeaster expansion with half of the state's rental car tax, and 42 of those were Republican legislators, most of whom represent rural parts of eastern, Down East, central and northern Maine.
All tracks lead to Augusta
"There are still so many people out there who think we are talking choo-choos and we are not," says Davis of TrainRiders/Northeast. "Do I have a basement full of train sets? No, I do not. I just don't like driving to Boston or New York."
Davis began riding trains out of necessity, he says, in the late 1980s, when a blown tire during a airplane landing sent the plane he was on spinning down the runway. Davis was shaken and took the train home, riding the rails for the first time since he was a soldier in the 1950s. As president of the Mortgage Bankers Association of Maine, Davis began taking the train from Portland to Washington, D.C., for the association's twice-annual meeting. He fell in love with his comfortable overnight Amtrak trips.
It wasn't long before Davis became obsessed with bringing passenger trains to Maine. He founded TrainRiders/Northeast in 1989 with two other train enthusiasts after the bank he had been working at folded. He expected it would take only four years to bring Amtrak to Portland — it was a no-brainer in his mind. But extension of passenger rail in the United States today involves a number of players — policymakers in Maine and at the Congressional level had to agree to fund the infrastructure upgrade and provide Amtrak the money necessary to run the Downeaster. Guilford Rail, which owns 76 miles of the track from Portland to Plastow, N.H., had to be convinced to allow passenger rail on a stretch that had for decades been used only for freight cars, which typically travel at between 10 miles and 40 miles per hour.
Davis' small Portland office is full of books on trains, train clocks and other rail ephemera. As the lone TrainRiders employee, Davis is trying to generate real rail buzz in the outside world. During the last legislative recess, he traveled the state visiting key legislators to drum up support for the Downeaster expansion to Brunswick. His tireless lobbying and schmoozing efforts in Congress and Augusta over the years appear to be lately paying off — Gordon Page, executive director of Maine Eastern Railroad, a seasonal excursion line that runs from Brunswick to Rockland, says he's secured a commitment from Augusta officials to clear the track there so his train can be a conduit from the Downeaster's Brunswick station to not just Rockland but also to Augusta in 2010. And the Maine Department of Transportation, keen to support alternative public transportation in light of global warming concerns and fuel prices, is studying the price of readying 29 miles of track from Portland to Lewiston/Auburn to apply for federal funding for public transit. If passenger trains extend to L/A, then the state could consider converting track on to Montreal.
Davis, 73, pulls out a map of existing Maine tracks pasted to a poster board. He says his primary role is to educate the public and policymakers about the opportunities of rail transportation, and this poster is one of his tools. Snaking across the state map are rail arteries connecting Maine's counties, color coded according to who owns the track. Here, there is an east-west rail line and a north-south conduit — ways to ride the rails to every corner of the state. Most of the track is used for freight, but Davis envisions that one day passengers like him can enjoy a catered meal in a dining car from Bangor to Portland, or from Lewiston to Montreal. Davis has worked for nearly two decades for the all aboard. When will it ever come?
He smiles and shrugs.
"It's impossible to predict, it's so up to the political community," he says. "It starts with Augusta."
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