Amtrak's Ethan Allen Service from Burlington to New York City has thrived. Local politicians and other rail advocates were all-aboard for the launch in July 2022, the first of its kind in nearly 70 years. VermontBiz photos.
by C.B. Hall, Vermont Business Magazine In the wake of the very successful extension of Amtrak's Ethan Allen Express service to Burlington in 2022, $1 million in new federal funds will be advancing possibilities for a further expansion of the national passenger rail provider's presence in Vermont.
The recently announced federal grants consist of $500,000 to plan expansion of service on the route of Vermont's other passenger train, the Vermonter, and $500,000 towards the inauguration of a new train that would originate in New York City and call in Manchester and Bennington on its way to Burlington.
An informational release from Amtrak described the first appropriation as aimed at extending service on the Washington, DC-to-St. Albans Vermonter north to Montreal, and providing a second train on the route, although it would only go as far north as White River Junction.
As the service's sponsor, Vermont will use the half-million dollars to "develop a scope, schedule, and cost estimate for preparing, completing, or documenting its service development plan" towards those ends.
The second grant will allow Vermont to develop similar plans for a companion route to the current, New York-Albany-Burlington Ethan Allen, but routed via North Bennington, on the route of the long-defunct Rutland Railroad, rather than Saratoga Springs.
That would bring passenger trains back to Bennington County for the first time since the Rutland Railroad ended all passenger service in 1953.
Dan Delabruere, who heads the Rail and Aviation Bureau at Vermont's Agency of Transportation (VTrans), termed it "unlikely" that the new train would call in Bennington village:
The rail spur from North Bennington into Bennington village is inactive – part of it has become a rail trail, in fact – so that the train would presumably stop at the depot that still stands in the former village.
According to Amtrak's release, Vermont's $1 million forms part of a $34.5 million outlay for "planning and development of 69 new and improved intercity passenger rail corridors, which Amtrak is primed to support" across the country – including even Alaska, where the state government owns its own railroad and operates its own passenger service on it. The $34.5 million, in turn, is part of an $8.2 billion package that President Joe Biden announced in December.
The lion's share of that sum will go towards repair and construction of passenger rail infrastructure in nine states.
"Finally, finally the US is attempting to catch up with the rest of the world with modern rail transportation," was the reaction from Brad Worthen, spokesman for the Vermont Rail Action Network advocacy group.
Where Are The Cars?
Amtrak's post-pandemic resurgence coincides with the tenure of a president known in rail circles as Amtrak Joe for his practice of commuting by Amtrak to the nation's capital from his Delaware home, during his long tenure as a US senator.
In 2021, shortly after his inauguration as president, Amtrak rolled out its "Amtrak Connects US" vision, which proposed creation or improvement of service on 64 routes. Announcing that initiative, the company described itself as "ready to power America forward towards a brighter horizon with our vision to improve transportation across the nation."
Implementation and maintenance of service on each of those routes depends, however, on the willingness of the affected states, Vermont included, to sponsor the services' operations.
The $8.2 billion package brings the expansion initiatives a bit closer to realization, but, in addition to the state funding issue, the question looms of how many new passenger cars all that growth might require, however primed and ready Amtrak is for its operational role.
As of June 2023 the company operated only 1434 serviceable passenger cars, according to data from James Tilley, a nationally prominent passenger rail advocate and former freight railroad executive.
"Many existing Amtrak services are losing prospective patrons because there aren't enough seats or sleeping compartments in the cars assigned to the route," Carl Fowler, a veteran passenger rail advocate who lives in Williston, told VermontBiz.
Amtrak placed an order for 137 cars in 2012, but as of last June only 57 of them were in service – none of them in Vermont. The first of the cars ordered went into service only in 2022, after technical problems were resolved.
By that time Amtrak had, however, placed another order for 83 so-called Airo trainsets – cars coupled together semi-permanently in a unit, or consist, consisting in this case of six to eight cars. The company announced that these next-generation cars would operate on many routes, including both of Vermont's. They are to begin entering service in 2026, a goal that may prove elusive, however, given the glitches that can bedevil high-tech rolling stock.
Vermont's trains currently use cars that have seen as many as 49 years of service.
"With everything Amtrak's ordered over the last 10 or 15 years, nothing has shown up on time," Tilley said. "Engineering issues... you name it, they've had it."
Asked in an email interview when Vermont would see its Airo cars, Amtrak media representative Jen Flanagan said, "We do not have an estimated service start date" for the cars on either Vermont train, but that the new equipment is scheduled to debut in 2026 – in the Pacific Northwest.
Current Services Doing Splendidly
Vermont has a higher density of passenger rail stations than any other state – 14 of them, or one for about every 46,000 residents. And whatever the barriers that the expansion visions and revisions may encounter, the state's current services are doing splendidly.
The Ethan Allen had a total of 86,600 boardings and alightings in the 2023 federal fiscal year, which ended September 30.
The expansion of the train's itinerary to Burlington in 2022 added 28% to the route's mileage but increased its ridership by 71% compared to fiscal 2019, the last pre-pandemic year. The Vermonter, whose route hasn't changed since 2014, meanwhile increased its ridership by almost 3% over the same period, even although the Ethan Allen's arrival in Burlington sucked away some patronage at the Vermonter's Essex Junction stop.
Total "on-offs" at the two Burlington-area stops exceeded 37,000 in 2023, as opposed to about 21,000 in 2019, when Essex Junction was the only stop serving the area.
Worthen called the numbers "very positive. These are numbers that we can continue to look for increases in... People are using the train."
Still, success has had its downside. The Ethan Allen typically has 314 seats, and Burlington, one of 14 points served north of New York City, has accounted for a substantial portion of its passenger load.
Last year, boardings peaked on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, when 244 people got on in the Queen City.
"It's not been possible to supplement the Ethan Allen's equipment at any point," Fowler noted. "There was no sign of extra equipment being assigned in Vermont during the Thanksgiving holiday," the nation's busiest period for travel.
"We've had incredible success with ridership on both [Vermont] trains," he said. "We're doing fantastically, but we're hitting a wall."
A PPP in Vermont?
There's both overlap and divergence between Amtrak's initiatives and the Green Mountain State's official rail plan, most recently revised in 2021. The plan's first-tier priorities for passenger service include the restoration of the Vermonter's St. Albans-to-Montreal connection, which Amtrak has not provided since 1995.
The return to Montreal has stood at or near the top of Vermont's rail agenda since 2011, when then-governor Peter Shumlin committed the state to restoring the link, but the hopes have stumbled over the need to improve a few miles of track in southern Quebec and build a new customs pre-clearance facility at Montreal's Central Station, the Vermonter's putative destination in the Canadian metropolis.
Generally, the challenges inherent in getting buy-in from governments in two different countries have proven knotty.
Adding the service via Manchester, the focus of the other $500,000 federal grant, appears in the state rail plan as only a third-tier priority. That tier also includes the reinstitution of passenger rail service over the eight miles of low-grade track between Burlington and Essex Junction.
That would allow for a one-seat ride between the Queen City and Montreal, and also open up possibilities for regional service connecting Burlington, Waterbury and Montpelier, for example.
Interviewed on the Ethan Allen's inaugural run from Burlington in 2022, Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner said, "We're aware of the interest" in adding the key eight miles to the Amtrak network, but the recent grant announcements made no mention of it.
The $8.2 billion federal package does however include a $3 billion grant towards construction of a privately operated high-speed passenger service between Las Vegas and the Los Angeles metropolitan area, as well as appropriations to Alaska's state-owned railroad for both planning and repair work. The outlays for non-Amtrak routes betoken a widening of interest in service modes that the company has historically kept at arm's length.
The public-private partnership (PPP) that will push the Las Vegas project forward has a parallel of sorts in Vermont in the 2019 proposal by David Blittersdorf's AllEarth Rail to institute a commuter-rail service, using that company's self-propelled rail coaches, for the greater Burlington region.
Blittersdorf had purchased the 12 used coaches from a Texas transit agency and rehabbed them, retrofitting them with under-floor electric motors that provide the motive power. The state passed on the idea.
In a recent interview, Blittersdorf told VermontBiz that his cars, which are being stored in Barre, were still available for a regional-rail PPP; but barring that, he added, "They're probably going to leave the state" for use elsewhere. "I cannot wait another 10 years or even five years for a governor with a vision of where we need to go with rail," he said.
David Blittersdorf's AllEarth self-propelled Budd cars (rolling into Montpelier in August 2017) have been sitting idly by and may never hit the tracks as a commuter option in Vermont.
Getting The Minutes Out
Neither the lack of rolling stock nor any complacency over the Vermont trains' recent patronage gains means that efforts to improve the state's passenger service further have been called off.
In addition to Blittersdorf's rejected proposal, some passenger rail advocates have argued, for instance, that the Ethan Allen could do better by speeding up its schedule. At two hours flat, the train trip from Burlington to Rutland, for example, is hardly fast.
"The train is almost always ahead of time coming into Rutland," Fowler said. "The schedule should have a minimum of 20 minutes taken out between Burlington and Albany."
Last September, at the most recent meeting of the statutory Vermont Rail Advisory Council, VTrans's Delabruere stated that "we have been working with Amtrak to shorten the amount of time between point A and point B,'" according to the draft minutes of the meeting; but, he said, it's "not as simple as just saying, 'Make the train leave 20 or 30 minutes later out of Burlington' ... There’s many options and we’re looking at all of them."
Fowler reported that VTrans, Amtrak, the New York Department of Transportation and the Canadian Pacific Railway, whose tracks the Ethan Allen follows in New York, committed themselves last spring to a substantial reduction in the train's overall running time, but that assurance has yet to be fulfilled.
Asked for comment for this article, Delabruere said, “There are adjustments to the schedule that are anticipated to be made in the next several months that will reduce the overall run time. We are still working with Amtrak and the freight railroads to create a schedule that will work for all parties involved."
"Amtrak is working pretty well," Blittersdorf concluded, "but there's a long way to go."
