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your homegrown newspaper February 19, 2025
Vol. 21, No. 23
Passenger rail in Montana faces uncertain future By Justin Franz, Montana Free Press
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ollowing decades of penny-pinching, the first half of the 2020s appeared to be the beginning of a golden age for passenger rail investment in the United States. Since 2021, Amtrak has received approximately $32 billion from the federal government as a result of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, allowing the national passenger railroad to address a years-long backlog of infrastructure and equipment upgrades. The act also provided funding to study the expansion of Amtrak’s network — including reviving a second route across Montana, the North Coast Hiawatha, that hasn’t had service since 1979. While the fruits of that historic investment are still years away in some instances, officials had other reasons to celebrate. During fiscal year 2024, Amtrak carried a record-breaking 32.8 million passengers, a 15% increase over the previous year and a return to its pre-pandemic ridership. The railroad also brought in $2.5 billion in ticket revenue, a record amount in its 53-year history. Despite those reasons for optimism, passenger rail advocates are concerned that the progress
PHOTO BY JUSTIN FRANZ / MTFP
Passengers get off the Empire Builder at East Glacier Park in June 2019. More than 10,000 people arrived or departed from the East Glacier Park station in fiscal year 2024.
made in the last few years will come to a halt, given the rapidly changing politics in Washington, D.C., and the continued need for new equipment, particularly in the western United States. “We are trying to reverse 50 years of neglect, and you just can’t do that in a year or two,” said Jim Mathews, president and CEO of Rail Passengers Association, a non-profit that advo-
cates for more train service. HISTORIC INVESTMENT Amtrak began running trains on May 1, 1971, when it took over the passenger services of 20 privately owned freight railroads. While passenger trains had been profitable decades earlier, the advent of air travel and the construction of the federal interstate system stole a sizeable chunk of rail’s ridership. However, the
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government was reluctant to let the railroads give up on passenger service altogether, so it created a quasi-public organization to run a slimmed-down network. Using a fleet of old equipment cobbled together from the previous operators, Amtrak survived and slowly increased its ridership from 15 million annually in the see page 2