The current cheerleading contest about whether Amherst should hang onto the Amtrak train from Washington to Vermont or whether the train should revert to an older route through Northampton gives everyone a chance to shout for their side, which is always a lot of fun. But the question hinges on how the Northampton corridor lost that service in the first place, and whether the same thing would happen again if the "river towns" got the train back.
It's hard to read the mind of the bosses of Pan Am Railways, formerly Guilford Transportation Industries. But that's what somebody's got to do to determine if federal stimulus money paid out to get the tracks back in shape from Springfield through Northampton and into Vermont would give the Valley a working train route in the long run, or would just line the pockets of a company whose track record is controversial, to say the least.
In 1983, when Mellon heir Timothy Mellon bought the old Boston and Maine right-of-way through Western Massachusetts, you could get on the Amtrak train in Northampton—a train that originated in Washington—in the middle of the night and wake up in Montreal. Four years later, Amtrak was locked in a bitter battle with Mellon and his company, Guilford, over the state of the tracks, which had deteriorated too much to support passenger train speeds. That year the Montrealer stopped running over the route that included the Northampton stop. Only freight trains continued to run over that route, and those derailed at a rate that vexed local officials in Franklin County.
Within two years Amtrak made a deal with the Central Vermont Railway, whose tracks through Amherst were better kept up, and passenger service in the upper Valley was off to a new start, albeit one that left Northampton's once busy station languishing and didn't even pick up passengers in Palmer, a town that's a hotbed of interest in rail travel (see "The Town of Seven Railroads," June 4, 2009), but at the moment is only the switching place where the train, now called the Vermonter, changes tracks on its way north.
Meanwhile Pan Am, not known for tidiness in its business practices, fell behind in its tax payments to towns where it maintained yards, such as Deerfield, where its back tax bill at one point in 2007 reached $362,000—a point that has nothing to do with transportation per se but that means that someone should demand some financial accounting before anyone hands the company a sizable infusion of public money.
Can Pan Am be trusted to take federal funding and give the region a set of tracks that will work for passenger traffic? If not, the case put forward by hopeful contenders Northampton, Holyoke and Greenfield is derailed totally without reference to Amherst's or Palmer's attempts at self-promotion.
Dana Roscoe of the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, who has been working on the so-called "Knowledge Corridor" project—a plan to get the train running on the older route—says the question of Pan Am's reliability has already been taken into account. "Before I ever invested one single hour in this project," Roscoe told the Advocate, "I went to Worcester and personally discussed that with [Pan Am president] David Fink and said, 'This is your track, this is your property. Is Pan Am going to commit to this?'
"What he said is, if you look at the Downeaster between Portland and Boston, it's one of Amtrak's shining gems. The ridership has been going up and up and up. That is a Pan Am track. They've changed their ways. They saw the opportunity there, they took advantage of it, and it's been to everyone's advantage. The other thing that's changed is their merger with Norfolk and Southern. With that Class I carrier also involved in the picture, it brings a much longer history of reputable service.
"If they had maintained their tracks in 1989, the move never would have happened. The move happened because it was the only way to get passengers to Vermont, not because it was the best way to get passengers to Vermont. At that time Guilford was playing the 'too bad' card. I think they've had a change of heart.
"Before federal funds can be spent, they must agree to terms that will allow long-term operations on this line. Vermont will also have to make commitments to keep that service functioning. Your fears—we fix their tracks and then they kick us out—the feds don't want that to happen, either. All those agreements will have to be in place."
Roscoe is willing to commit himself; he says he believes that Guilford-Pan Am-Pan Am Southern will make good. The feds still have to make their decision, and before they make it, others have a right to be heard.
