Clearing the line: Amtrak service to our area should improve

Missouri is on its way to clearing a bottleneck that should greatly improve Amtrak service across the state.

Legislators have come up with $5 million to begin work to extend a couple of rail sidings on the Union Pacific line between here and Jefferson City. That’s the line Amtrak uses for service between Kansas City and St. Louis, with stops in Independence and Lee’s Summit.

Those passenger trains run chronically late, mostly because a lot of freight trains are longer than the sidings at California, Mo., and Strassburg, Mo.. The result is that it’s often Amtrak – just an engine and three or four passenger cars – that has to pull over and wait when it meets a freight train coming the other way.

Make no mistake: When it has a clear shot, Amtrak rolls and makes good time. It’s efficient and affordable. But our cross-state line has been one of the few in Amtrak’s entire system to see ridership decline in recent years, something just about everyone – riders, experts, railroads, lawmakers – attributes to its not-on-time performance.

Nationwide, Amtrak set a record in 2007 with 25 million riders, and it will smash that record this year. The Kansas City-to-St. Louis route has seen a sharp jump in the last year, but Amtrak is quick to point that a year ago construction work had reduced service and even put passengers on buses at times.

The $5 million the General Assembly and governor have approved is half of the $10 million the Missouri Department of Transportation requested. MoDOT will try to get grant money to match it. In business terms, the government has always left Amtrak woefully undercapitalized – and then it punishes the railroad when it runs late and loses money. This is a modest step in the right direction. It should help both Amtrak and the Union Pacific, to the benefit of the state’s overall economy.

This is comparable to other energy issues getting a lot of attention these days. Oh, if only we’d started buying fuel-efficient cars 10 years ago, people now say. If we’d only stepped up oil and gas production in the Gulf and other places 10 years ago. Even if we start now, the benefits will be years away. True, but where will we be 10 years from now if we don’t start tackling the tough issues?