The exterior of Union Station is seen on Frank Murray Street in downtown Springfield.
SPRINGFIELD – Amtrak ridership through the stations at Springfield and Amherst has risen 16.2 percent since 1997 on the strength of short-haul routes linking Springfield with the passenger railroad’s busy Northeast corridor service, according to a recent study by The Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.
In 1997, just 134,766 people used the two stations. By 2012 that number had risen to 326,421, according the report. Nearby, Greater Hartford with its five Amtrak stations saw a 27 percent increase in ridership. Amtrak ridership originating in Greater Boston went up 211 percent from 1 million in 1997 to 3.2 million in 2012, according to the study.
“You can see there is a demand for this short-distance service,” said Joseph Kane, a policy and research assistant with the Metropolitan Policy Program.
Kane’s study says Amtrak is reinventing itself as a viable alternative to driving and airlines but hat the service needs consistent and clear funding in order to grow.
Up and down the Connecticut River Valley, states are reinvesting in the tracks themselves. Connecticut is spending $121 million on tracks with federal money. Massachusetts has already started $73 million in track work in this state. Vermont is doing $54 million in track work.
The stations are getting makeovers as well.
Workers are already prepping Springfield’s Union Station for the $48.7 million first phase of its comprehensive makeover.
In Holyoke, the Massworks infrastructure program gave $2 million to build a new passenger program.
Northampton is also considering station improvements. The track work will bring the north-south Amtrak trains back to a route running along the Connecticut River starting in 2014. The trains will no longer go through Amherst.
The Brookings study said overall Amtrak ridership grew by 55 percent since 1997, faster than other major travel modes, and carried 31 million riders in 2012, an all-time high, Kane said. Nearly 90 percent of that ridership, not unexpectedly, comes from the 100 biggest metropolitan areas in the United States, a list that includes Greater Springfield.
In general, shorter Amtrak routes made money and long-haul cross-country routes lost money, Kane said. That’s exactly what he expected to find: more people willing to ride for a few hours and avoid the congestion on roads and airports compared with few people ready to ride the real-life train they call the “City of New Orleans” for 900 miles.
Routes losing money also include the New Haven to Springfield service. With 385,000 riders a year, the trains brought in $11.6 million in revenue but cost $24.4 million to operate in 2011, according to the Brookings study.
In the study, the ridership numbers are from 2012 but the most recent financial data is from 2011.
The Vermonter, another train that passes through Springfield, lost $1.9 million in 2011.
Timothy W. Brennan, executive director of the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, said rail travel will be competitive with highway travel once the track work is done.
“You can’t compete until the trains travel at highway speeds,” Brennan said. “You can’t compete if the trains go five miles an hour and don’t arrive on time.”
The new rails up and down the valley will do that, he said.
Connecticut’s plan to have commuter rail service from Springfield to Hartford and New Haven will be a boon as well. Starting in 2016 Connecticut want to run trains every 30 minutes at peak times, as many as 17 or 20 trains a day. That’ll be up from five or six a day now.
“The cash cow of Amtrak is the Northeast Corridor. We need to be connected to it,” Brennan said.
Plans to connect this region by rail with Boston are also moving, Brennan said. A Massachusetts Department of Transportation study on the Springfield-Worcester-Boston “Inland Route” begins this month. Rehabbing those tracks would cost $362 million, according to state estimate.
Kevin E. Kennedy, Springfield’s chief development officer, said he thinks passenger rail will still get federal finding even with the upcoming budget crunches, especially in the crowded Northeast.
“All the highways are congested, you can’t expand them,” Kennedy said.
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