Fighting the good fight in Michigan

People who fight for better passenger-train service never get combat pay, but they deserve it. 

That’s a conclusion I reached last Saturday after attending the annual meeting of the Michigan Association of Railroad Passengers (www.marp.org), which is celebrating its 40^th year. Founded by John De Lora in 1973, MARP has been on the front lines for nearly every effort to improve Amtrak service in the Wolverine State. Sometimes its members fight the big battles: saving the all-important ex-Conrail line from Kalamazoo east toward Detroit, expanding 110-mph service, pushing for more frequencies. Sometimes it’s only a skirmish: keeping a station restroom open, getting a parking lot paved. Every time, they apply pressure with expertise and dedication.

I’d been invited to speak to MARP by an old friend and a mainstay of the organization, Jim Wallington, who spent many years as a reporter for the Lansing State Journal. The association gathered in that most sacred of Michigan railroad places, the depot at Durand, historic crossroads of the Grand Trunk Western and still one of America’s truly great small-town stations.

I can’t vouch for how well my comments were received (interrupted at times by CN freights), but I hope the group enjoyed my basic message, which was that their efforts are of lasting value. The fact that the attendees included the top Michigan DOT rail official Tim Hoeffner, and a staff member from U.S. Sen. Carl Levin’s office, Melissa Horste, says something about MARP’s standing.

My comments also had a subtext: that MARP should be glad it’s in Michigan, and not my current home state of Wisconsin. Whatever passenger-train advocates must endure in Michigan, it’s nothing compared to living in the looking-glass world of the Badger State, where opponents led by Gov. Scott Walker turned a promising high-speed program on its head, and sent two perfectly good Talgo trainsets packing for greener pastures.

But that’s a topic for another day.

For now, things are looking up in Michigan, despite a current arrangement that terminates Chicago-Detroit-Pontiac trains Monday-Thursday at Jackson, where Amtrak passengers are obliged to finish their trips by bus. It’s an agonizingly bad situation, but it serves a good purpose: giving Amtrak track and signal crews a chance to begin the long-anticipated upgrade of 135 miles of main line east form Kalamazoo. A wonderful development made possible by last year’s sale of the Kalamazoo-Dearborn segment to the state by Norfolk Southern, which inherited the line from Conrail.

When completed in a couple of years, the improvements should help Michigan claim status as a showcase for Midwestern service. That’s because 95 miles of the route is already in first-class condition, thanks to Amtrak’s purchase in the 1970s of the former Michigan Central line from Kalamazoo west to Porter, Ind. That segment was quickly upgraded to a smooth 79 mph and since 2000 has added sections of 110 mph operation.

With NS’s conveyance to the state of most of the rest of the old MC, Amtrak’s Wolverine Service trains will be close to having a nearly completely rebuilt main line within Michigan. All of this will certainly give Amtrak a chance to do even more with the robust market it has along this corridor, thanks in part to the huge communities of students at a number of large universities along the line, notably Western Michigan in Kalamazoo, Eastern Michigan in Ypsilanti, and, most of all, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

At Saturday’s meeting in Durand, I got the impression that MARP members aren’t quite ready to pat themselves on the back over what’s happening in their state, but they’re allowing themselves to believe that great things are finally happening. Especially if they cast their eyes south toward Ohio, or west toward Wisconsin, where passenger trains have become anathema to significant parts of the electorate.

That’s not the case in Michigan, and for that, MARP can take a bow.