[T]he Montrealer was a colorful train. During Prohibition, when the Boston and Maine Railroad operated the Montreal-Vermont-Washington, D.C., service, it became known as “The Bootlegger” because its southbound version carried plenty of well-hidden illegal liquor across the border.
After Amtrak began running it in 1972, the train developed a reputation as a party on wheels. In winter the southbound, which passed through Vermont at night, attracted skiers happy to unwind after a holiday on the slopes. The train included a lounge car, Le Pub, which for a time featured live music and “specially priced Harvey Wallbangers,” according to a 1986 Philadelphia Inquirer story.
In 1995, financial constraints led Amtrak to eliminate the train and replace it with a daytime St. Albans-Washington service, the Vermonter, subsidized by the state. Severing the link to the dominion’s second-largest metro area cut seriously into the patronage and farebox revenue, while the on-board merriment slipped into history.
Recent efforts, such as a plan to eliminate tedious on-the-border customs checks, has revived hopes that Vermonters might soon be able to travel to the Botanical Gardens or a Canadiens’ hockey game and leave their car at home.
The passage in late 2008 of federal legislation that obliged states to fund a greater share of the expense of trains like the Vermonter gave impetus to the current drive to reinstate the missing St. Albans-Montreal link.
“We knew our costs were going up, and we needed other ways to generate income,” said Karen Songhurst, policy analyst at the Agency of Transportation (VTrans). In January 2011, when new Gov. Peter Shumlin promised to restore the link, efforts gathered more steam, Vermont Rail Action Network (VRAN) president Christopher Parker said.
In March, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Canadian Ministry of Public Safety concluded an agreement, seen as crucial to the restoration, that will allow customs and immigration pre-clearance of U.S.-bound travelers boarding at Montreal’s Gare Centrale station. That means that U.S. Customs and Border Protection will attend to border formalities for passengers there, just as they do at Montreal’s airport, obviating the need for travelers to endure a wait of an hour or more on a train stopped at the Vermont border.
“Many families, like our own, have relatives and friends on both sides of our border,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, the project’s key backer in Washington, said in a news release. “This agreement has long been a goal, and a dream, for Vermonters who have fond memories of rail trips to Montreal to enjoy all that its vibrant cultural capital has to offer.”
Progress chugs along
That progress has been nothing if not slow. The March agreement grew out of the so-called Beyond the Border Action Plan concluded by President Barack Obama and Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper more than four years before, in February 2011. In May 2012, both of Vermont’s U.S. senators publicly urged the border authorities “to take the necessary steps to conclude an agreement before the end of 2012 for the pre-clearance of cross border rail passengers,” while the Shumlin administration announced a target of 2014 for the service’s return. Forced to revise his timeline when he addressed VRAN’s annual meeting in November 2014, the governor, as quoted in the St. Albans Messenger, pledged to “’work as hard as I know how’” to restore the link before his then-upcoming term expired in January 2017.
All of which demonstrates that reinstating an international train, on tracks owned by two different railroads – the Canadian National (CN) north of the border and the New England Central to the south – is no simple proposition. The customs agreement will require approval in Canada’s parliament before the pre-clearance facility can be built, although U.S. law does not require analogous approval from Congress, Leahy field representative Chris Saunders said. He said that a yes vote in Ottawa is considered likely, and that the construction’s design should be finalized this year.
At that point, the complexities of funding a facility involving numerous parties on both sides of the border will rise to the top of the agenda. He declined to speculate further as to any timeline, including any date for the actual restoration of the service.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” he said.
Parker’s best guess was that the new train would be running in “a couple of years.”
“I’d be really hesitant,” Songhurst said, on the same question. “Our hope is that we could be back over the border in the next few years.”
Having underwritten the service since 1995, VTrans will presumably assert its naming rights, meaning that the Montreal train will remain the Vermonter. But if Quebec provides any sort of operating support, the province could push for a return to the Montrealer. And, since the object is essentially to restore a service historically called the Montrealer, why shouldn’t that name be used?
“I think the folks on the other side of the border will be perfectly happy to have it remain the Vermonter, but that all remains to be seen,” Songhurst said.
VTrans’ deputy secretary and former planning chief, Chris Cole, likewise considered it probable that the current name would be retained, but offered no assurances.
“Maybe the Vermontrealer,” he quipped.
With the pre-clearance procedures essentially settled, a “conceptual design,” Songhurst said, has been completed for the Montreal facility and awaits review by U.S. Customs and Border Protection – and funding. There has been no movement on track-use agreements with CN, which, like the U.S. railroads who own most of the track that Amtrak utilizes, will charge for access to its line. “We’re not expecting that there’d be any hurdles,” Songhurst said. “It’s always just a question of what’s the price tag?”
Parker noted that arrangements with CN should benefit from the Quebec provincial government’s support for the project, in contrast to its lack of involvement in the Montrealer’s operation. The province has shown at least some interest in upgrading a few key miles of track immediately north of the border, although Songhurst said that the segment’s condition as is would likely suffice for passenger trains.
South of the border, federally funded upgrades to the tracks between St. Albans and the border are virtually complete, according to Dan Delabruere, rail program director at VTrans.
Asked to comment on the merits and problems of extending the train to Montreal, Amtrak representative Christina Leeds deferred to state officials – as Amtrak normally does when asked about the expansion of a state-sponsored route. VRAN’s Parker described the benefits as a question of evening out the load factor, the number of passengers on board relative to the train’s capacity.
Right now, he said, “The Vermonter starts out practically empty in St. Albans and gets full only around Hartford [Connecticut].”
The connection to Montreal “balances the demand” between Montreal and New York City, the biggest destination in the route’s southern reaches, Parker said.
“It’s like having an anchor store at both ends of the mall,” he said “It should significantly improve the economics of the train. The logic of it is fairly apparent. We just need to make sure that the complications at the border and with CN don’t cause so much cost that they eat up the benefits.”
U.S. route improves
The Vermonter has improved its performance in recent years. Federal stimulus funding has catalyzed upgrades to the route in both Vermont and Massachusetts. Those improvements will ultimately make the ride from Vermont to New York and Washington as much as 50 minutes faster than in years past. Ridership has risen every year but one of the last seven, with patronage reaching an all-time high of more than 89,000 last year, according to Amtrak. The opening of new stations in Massachusetts in December promises further increases.
Bringing the Canadian metropolis back onto the line is expected to give the ridership yet another boost. Before its demise, the Montrealer carried about 75,000 persons across the border annually, Songhurst said, and returning the train to Montreal, in the absence of any other changes to its operation, would bump up boardings and alightings in Vermont by roughly 70 percent, according to an extrapolation of data from VTrans consultants Parsons Brinckerhoff, who also concluded that the train would recover about 55 percent of its costs through fares — better than average for Amtrak services.
The 55 percent recovery ratio looks good in comparison with the Vermonter’s figure, which, as the VTrans reckons things, currently stands at 44 percent. (The latter figure, unlike the 55 percent, includes the relatively minor revenue from on-board food service as well as fares.) But that’s for a daytime train much like what Vermont has today.
A 2011 Amtrak analysis provided to VTDigger by Amtrak concluded that an overnight Montreal-Vermont-Washington train would perform better, attracting almost 20 percent more riders than a daytime service and requiring $746,000 less in state subsidization. (“State,” in this context, also includes Connecticut and Massachusetts, which began to help subsidize the train in 2013.)
The nighttime option did better because its schedule would accommodate travelers to and from Montreal conveniently. But the numbers for the daytime scenario would likely look better if recomputed today, primarily because the route has, since 2011, become faster on this side of the border. That allows for more attractive scheduling all along the route. In any case, a daytime train would serve many more travelers boarding or disembarking in Vermont, and the state, therefore, is not interested in nighttime service — however much better it might look in an Amtrak pro forma.
Amtrak’s analysis, like Parsons Brinckerhoff’s, found that a Montreal train will recover a greater portion of its costs than the Vermonter, but that the major growth in the scale of the operation would mean, in absolute terms, bigger subsidies.
According to Amtrak, a daytime train would cost an additional $3.5 million annually, while its revenues would rise by only $1.5 million. Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and conceivably the province of Quebec or even local communities served, would have to make up the added $2 million deficit.
“I wouldn’t hedge my bets on that information at this stage of the game,” Songhurst said of Amtrak’s findings. “All of the changes that have taken place in the operation since 2011 may change the dynamic of the overall cost factor and the ridership, which is the key to the revenue.”
In any event the train will bring more of our northern neighbors and their money to the state, and, in addition to reaching Montreal, will connect there with Canada’s VIA Rail, the dominion’s version of Amtrak, giving Vermonters more car-free access to far-away places.
“Our intent always is to provide more options for more destinations for Vermonters,” Songhurst said.
