New commuter trains started running Friday from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to New York City as part of a two-year pilot program. The new “Valley Flyer” line will bring two morning southbound and two evening northbound trains to commuters in northwestern Massachusetts — with the closest stop just a 30-minute drive from Brattleboro.
Brattleboro residents and passenger rail advocates have been hailing the move as something that could help bring a vital resource right to southern Vermonters’ backdoors. They say it’ll add a lot more flexibility than the current Vermonter train does, which runs each direction just once a day, traveling south through the region around midday.
“It’s something people have been talking about in our area for a long time,” said Peter Elwell, the town manager for Brattleboro. “So we’re optimistic that, yes, it will make a difference.”
The pilot has been called “use it or lose it” — if the trains don’t see an annual ridership of 24,000, it won’t be back for a third year. Dan Peacock, a member of the rail advocacy group Trains in the Valley, who has advocated for the new service, said it’s difficult to say how hard that number will be to hit.
“We’re not going to really know until we give it a couple months,” Peacock said. “But I think it will get great support.”
Peacock said there are a lot of people who need to spend a few hours in New York City, Philadelphia or Washington, D.C., that could really use the commuter line.
“Both for work-related reasons and for personal reasons, there’s a fair amount of this kind of trip,” he said. “It’s really very useful and very convenient for people.”
On weekends and holidays, a train will go in the opposite direction, bringing riders up from Springfield, Massachusetts, to the stops in Holyoke, Northampton and Greenfield.
But Carl Fowler, National Association of Railroad Passengers vice chair and a member of the Vermont Rail Action Network, said the thing that a lot of transportation services forget is the idea of “the last mile” — or how people are going to get from where the train ends to their actual destination.
“Or in this case, it’s the last 20 miles,” he joked.
He said a comprehensive busing system could get people without family and friends in the area to places like Brattleboro and Bellows Falls when they get off the train in Greenfield, if they want the trains to serve more than just locals.
He acknowledged that Amtrak probably couldn’t bring the commuter lines too much further north, or people would have to get on in the middle of the night to make it to the city by mid-morning.
“But the nice thing about adding frequencies to routes that already exist is that it’s not too expensive to do it,” he said. “The capital costs have already been paid for.”
Elwell said as far as Brattleboro is concerned, the town will keep working with Amtrak and other neighboring states to see if they can’t eventually bring these routes up into Vermont too.
“There’s just a lot of work going on around improving passenger rails in our area,” Elwell said. “It’s really exciting to see that bearing fruit.”
Clarification: This post was updated to clarify that the Vermonter train runs southbound through southern Vermont at midday.
