Rail crossing: What will it take for Maine to build a passenger train to L-A and beyond?

Patricia Quinn is sitting behind an open binder on her desk as thick as the A-to-L volume of the Oxford English Dictionary. As she looks for one statistic buried somewhere in its many hundreds of pages, she explains that the hefty tome is the latest grant application for Maine’s only passenger train, the Amtrak Downeaster.

Quinn and her small staff scrambled to finish the application after Florida Gov. Rick Scott rejected $2.4 billion from the federal government for a high-speed train between Tampa and Orlando. His refusal freed up these funds, setting off a whirlwind of grant writing by rail groups across the country.

Quinn, the executive director of the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority, which runs the Downeaster, is asking for $59 million to improve rail lines between Portland and Boston. The fixes would shave a mere 10 minutes from the two hours and 25 minutes the trip takes now. But those few minutes could draw 53,000 new riders a year and bring in an additional $750,000 of revenue, Quinn estimates.

While the focus of the grant is the line between Portland and Boston, this project, if approved, could affect the future of rail elsewhere in the state. Every investment that makes the existing train service faster, more comfortable and more popular increases the likelihood that passenger trains will someday be rushing across Maine, says Quinn.

“Before you expand the service, you have to improve the reliability and time of the core to compete with automobiles,” she says. “Passenger rail is only efficient when you have a lot of people using it because infrastructure is expensive.” In other words, every rider helps justify the federal and state subsidies that enable the continued development of rail.

Pounding in nails to add double tracks in Wells, Arundel and other spots, as the grant application requests, could echo as far as Auburn and Bethel, where rail enthusiasts are gearing up to advocate for a massive infrastructure project in their neck of the woods. Bringing passenger rail to Lewiston-Auburn, and then farther west through New Hampshire and eventually to Montreal, is seen as the next logical step for mass transit in Maine, for all the skiers, gamblers, leaf peepers, hikers and other tourists the trains would carry.

Rob Lally, who is both a co-owner of Mt. Abram Ski Resort in Greenwood and a partner in the Black Bear Entertainment casino slated to open in Oxford next spring, says a train would boost tourism and help revive the struggling towns along the tracks. “We would love to have the ability to bring more traffic to the community,” he says. “And I think we would be as supportive as anyone else to get that infrastructure or any other public infrastructure up.”

Robin Zinchuk, executive director of the Bethel Area Chamber of Commerce, says she is organizing a one-day conference, or “rally,” next September for 200 regional business people, policy makers and train advocates to discuss the resurrection of passenger rail. “That is where we see ourselves, creating this voice, this advocacy for passenger rail between the Auburn area and here,” she says.

And Mark Hall, vice president of development for Sunday River and Sugarloaf, says he has already provided the state with data on visitors to the ski resorts in support of a passenger train connecting Bethel to Boston, the mountains’ primary market.

Bolstering the conviction that passenger rail is inevitable in western Maine is not only the Downeaster’s popularity, but also high gas prices, climate change concerns and a growing interest in the train as an economic development tool. Three proposed bills in this legislative session would fund rail projects in western Maine (see “Trained on Augusta,” this page), and a fourth bill would create a task force to systematically plan more passenger rail in the state. The Maine Department of Transportation also recently presented a new feasibility study for a Portland-to-Montreal passenger train.

While some fiscal conservatives might quake at the huge expense of a new passenger train — upwards of $600 million to extend the line to Montreal — there appear to be more supporters than naysayers at this point. But Quinn, in her characteristically cautious way, says hold on. Before a train must first come a binder.

The slow route to success

In her Portland office, Quinn gestures to a bookshelf full of fat notebooks holding all kinds of rail development studies for Maine. “We used to do a study or make a plan with no chance of it happening. These plans that were there before, they were of no value to anybody,” she says.

Those days of futility, though, ended with the election of President Obama, who has been a strong voice for high-speed rail. The release of billions of dollars of stimulus money for transportation infrastructure also helped. In 2010, the NNEPRA received $35 million of stimulus funds to extend passenger rail to Freeport and Brunswick, a project that will be complete by 2012 and will return passenger trains to those tracks for the first time since the 1940s. The authority was able to win this grant because the project was deemed shovel ready. And being shovel ready, according to Quinn, means being backed up by years of planning and a slow build-up of the trunk service between Portland and Boston. Plus, she had already negotiated the fees with the railroad owners, received the environmental permits and completed the engineering studies before she got money to build the extension.

“You have to make it right. You have to make concentrated investments that deliver quantifiable benefits. And then you move on,” she says. “When we’re successful, that puts us in a better position to apply for federal grants,” the greatest source of rail funding by far.

From 2005 to 2010, the Downeaster’s ridership increased from 250,000 to 474,000, and ticket revenues doubled from $3.3 million to $6.6 million, which now accounts for about half of the train’s annual operating budget, according to Quinn. The remainder comes from federal and state subsidies. The rail authority has grown the train’s ridership by reaching out to commuters, Red Sox fans, patients who see specialized doctors, college students, school groups and professionals attending business meetings. “Our [marketing] strategy is we have lots of strategies,” Quinn says.

As for a train to Lewiston-Auburn, Quinn says, not surprisingly, “it’s important to have a plan, to know what it is going to look like, how much it will cost to build, how much it will cost to operate, and what the ridership will be.”

Despite’s Quinn’s sober talk and her careful, calculated rail-building strategy, some people are more freely predicting that by 2020, a train could be making daily trips between Portland and L-A, and maybe even farther.

The Downeaster’s success in a rural state with a small population supports the case for more trains, says Paul Weiss of the Maine Sierra Club. “We have had a very successful passenger service,” he points out. “And we want to expand it. You can’t argue with the numbers.”

Don Craig, director of transportation at the Androscoggin Valley Council of Governments, says, “If you look back at what happened in Brunswick, it was talked about as soon as they talked about going from Boston to Portland back in the mid-1990s. And it took them 10 years to get to the point where they could get the rail upgraded, and get that signed on and accepted.”

The master plan

Although Quinn makes many pointed remarks about today’s severely compromised state and federal budgets that have little money for trains, she does concede that the “extension of service up there [to Lewiston] is part of our master plan.”

Last fall, the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority won a $600,000 federal grant, with a $150,000 match, to figure out how to reduce the Downeaster Boston-Portland travel time and increase the daily trips from five to seven, as well as look at an eventual build-out to Lewiston-Auburn. And the Maine DOT recently publicized a new study analyzing intercity rail to Lewiston-Auburn, Bethel and Montreal. An intercity train generally has fewer daily roundtrips and runs for longer distances than a commuter train.

But readers of this study have had mixed reactions. Craig, at AVCOG, says the report was the first step to see whether the project should be carried forward. “And the answer is yes, and now it is time to start picking off what we need to pick off. We have to fix up the rail, and do that in increments over the next five years, and upgrade the rail lines and build bypass rail where it needs to be, and get the [Auburn] station up and running,” he says.

But Quinn has a slightly more guarded interpretation. She says the number of passengers predicted to ride a train between Auburn and Portland will not likely convince policy makers and taxpayers to invest in the service now. “The question becomes, will there be the population and popularity and will it be the state’s policy to fund it?” she says. “If the taxpayers are willing to fund it, we could start tomorrow.”

The report, by AECOM, a global firm of engineers, planners and project managers, found that the capital cost, in 2020 dollars, of bringing passenger trains to Auburn would be between $107 million and $234 million, and that the service would cost between $3.5 million and $9.4 million a year to operate. Meanwhile, this 40-minute train ride would attract only between 30,200 and 45,800 new riders per year, whose fares would cover between 15% and 27% of the train’s budget. The number of yearly riders would grow to about 70,000 if the train continued to Bethel. And if the train pushed on to Montreal — about a seven-hour ride — slightly more than 200,000 new riders would jump on, the report concludes. (Ridership estimates were based on a 2015-2020 timeline.)

It also estimated that a train between Portland and Montreal would cost between $676 million and $899 million to build, and between $23.4 million and $26 million a year to operate, with fares accounting for just under a third of the operating budget.

Rather than laying down new tracks, passenger trains would probably run along the St. Lawrence & Atlantic Railroad lines used now by lumbering freight trains. But passenger trains need to go faster, around 59 miles per hour, to appeal to riders who can just as easily drive. And to be safe, these trains need stronger lines and straighter tracks than what’s in the ground now.

Weiss, of the Sierra Club, says the public should compare the cost of trains to highways. “People see the huge cost on these rail projects and they don’t realize how much they’re spending on maintaining the highway systems,” he says. In fiscal years 2010 and 2011, for example, Maine budgeted $1.25 billion for its highways. At the same time, rail skeptics point out that more people use the highways than ride trains, bringing the per-user cost down.

Wayne Davis, who founded the nonprofit TrainRiders/Northeast in 1989 to advocate for passenger rail in Maine, agrees that the numbers in AECOM’s report are off-putting. But he says, “If we had taken every cost [for the Downeaster] and added it up 23 years ago, it wouldn’t have worked.” Quinn says the total capital investment in the Downeaster between 2001, when it started, and 2012, when the train will run up to Brunswick, will be about $106 million.

Davis continues, “That dollar amount would scare people. But all you need is two tracks that are safe, a modern signaling system and [a way] for people to get on and off. The way the numbers are presented seems unattractive, but it is not unattractive.”

Rebecca Goldfine, Mainebiz staff writer, can be reached at rgoldfine@mainebiz.biz.