You (may) get what you pay for

Maybe the photographs just don’t do it justice. Maybe the photographers didn’t know how to highlight the spectacular architecture. Maybe the taxpaying public got taken for another ride on Amtrak’s high-speed rail bus to nowhere.

I’m referring to the new so-called “high-speed” passenger station in Dwight, Illinois, unveiled, perhaps appropriately, Halloween just past. As reported in several local (to Dwight) newspapers, it is a 1,500-square-foot station for which the tab was “about” $3 million, and has modern amenities like wi-fi, and connections to bicycle and hiking paths. Seriously? Hope it has a toilet for that price.

Dwight is a village of under 5,000 souls located 80 miles southwest of Chicago on the route of Old Route 66 and Interstate 55, the latter of which bypasses Dwight on the west side of town. It had or has a railroad station of substance built in 1891 by the Chicago & Alton along the same rail line now used by Amtrak and Illinois’ Lincoln Service. Lincoln Service is the premier high-speed route supported by the Illinois Department of Transportation.

The best statistics I can find on boardings and alightings are for 2 fiscal years ago. Extrapolated using Amtrak’s general ridership trends over the past two years, Dwight has a probable average boarding number of 27 riders per day, or roughly (generously) six per train stop. (3 trains one way and 2 the other each day) Hmm!

This started me thinking. I couldn’t find any architectural drawings for the new station without making a trek to Dwight, but I think it fair to allow 800 feet for bathrooms, closet space, and ticketing/baggage. That’s assuming Amtrak has even allowed for the station to be manned, now or in the future. That still leaves an area about 20 by 35 feet for waiting room. Not unreasonable for that number of passengers.

The cost, however, is $4,285.00 per square foot of waiting space ($2k per square foot of building), or just over $119.00 per waiting/leaving passenger. That’s a lot by any measure.

And where do they get the architects for these projects? I’ve studied many railroad station projects. (Mostly in Europe, because that’s the only place they build a lot of new stations.) It is entirely possible to design and build railroad projects that look and feel like they belong in the 21st century, but this one appears to be a miniature, small-town airport terminal from the early 1960s, or, worse, the abortive kind of structures that struggling railroads were throwing up before Amtrak because they just weren’t trying to attract ridership.

Okay, don’t get on my case. I realize that the $3 million probably covers platforms, safety devices, etc. Perhaps even driveways, although it appears from the news articles that passengers are expected to bicycle or jog to the station. And, yes, I would imagine both the municipality and the IDOT are hoping for increased ridership in the future. It’s an “if you build it, they will come” kind of thing.

While I have repeatedly, in this blog, stated my position that passenger rail travel must be a part of a national transportation policy and funded on a consistent basis with public money, I do not like seeing common sense fall by the wayside when it comes to the facilities financed by that money. If we do so for too long and too often, the traveling public, already perfectly satisfied with airlines and automobiles, will lose interest in funding what some view as “a 19th century invention” that has lost its usefulness.

Finally, please, oh, please, do not trot out these projects for all to see and praise them as if they are the saving of all passenger rail service. It’s just a station, and there should be more of them, and more trains to stop at them. Praise them when the riders are there, and Illinois can call its high-speed rail project a success. Otherwise, put them up, make them functional, make them cost-effective, and don’t show me the public benefits until they are there for me to see.

©2016 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)