By CB Hall, Vermont Business Magazine More than three months after Amtrak and the Vermont Transportation Agency extended the Ethan Allen Express northbound by 68 miles from Rutland to Burlington, support for the train has exceeded expectations. Adding the new miles to the existing 200 miles of the New York City to Rutland route — a roughly 33% increase — led to a 51% increase in ridership in August, the first month of the new service, compared to ridership in 2018. August 2019, the last pre-pandemic year.
VTrans and Amtrak predicted the extension would add 2,000 to 2,500 riders per month to the fanbase, said Dan DeLabrure, director of regulation. Bureau of Railways and Aviation.
The total ridership of the train has exceeded 5000 riders in July 2019 when the service started in July. In August the profit was more than 3000.
In Vermont Ethan Allen stops at Ferrisburgh, immediately outside the Vergennes city limits, and at Middlebury and Castleton, in addition to Burlington and Rutland.
The train supports one of the three mass transit options, VTrans, along the Route 7 corridor, and the other two are buses that run from Colchester through Bennington to the Amtrak station in Rensselaer, New York, just outside of Albany.
Asked if there are plans to add stops in Shelburne and Brandon, as has been mentioned on occasion, DeLaBrure said VTrans will “monitor future stop requests, but is focusing on the new service stops in Burlington, Vergennes and Middlebury for now.”
Carl Fowler, a Williston-based commuter rail advocate, called the proposed extension “an unequivocal success.”
He said the fan figures had “blown away expectations”.
“I think we’re kicking butt on ridership,” said Melinda Moulton, who recently retired as executive director of the Main Street Inn, the longtime owner and leader of Burlington’s Union Station for the past decade. Efforts have been made to return passenger services to the Queen City after a 69-year hiatus.
“When Howard Dean was governor of Vermont, we were both called America’s ‘Players’ on NBC National News and got $1.5 million to share the old Union Station for Amtrak. To the interviewer, he said, ‘People love trains and they ride them. So here we are 25 or 30 years later, and Amtrak in Burlington. We got a train.
Faster times ahead?
Time management, however, was another question.
On its first trip on July 29, the train left Burlington five minutes late. He left his first stop, Ferrisburgh-Vergennes, about 15 minutes late. Fowler, who was on the train, told VBM it left Middlebury 22 minutes late – but arrived in Rutland on schedule.
Fowler’s seemingly unusual accounting is explained by the timetable, which gives the train about 71 minutes to get from Middlebury to Rutland, a distance of only 34 miles.
A common practice in Amtrak’s schedule, this “padding” adds extra time to segments that terminate at key stations, in this case Rutland, to facilitate arrival at the advertised time, where a relatively large number of customers will be waiting for that arrival.
An analysis by Massachusetts-based rail advocate Ben Heckscher found that the train took an average of 47 minutes to travel between Middlebury and Rutland in August and concluded that “at least 20 minutes should be removed from the schedule for this segment.” “
In total, the schedule calls for a two-hour trip from Burlington to Rutland and a one-hour, 59-minute trip from Rutland to Burlington. Both times exceed the one hour and 40 minutes used as a benchmark for planning the service’s launch — and match the time it took the defunct Rutland Railroad to speed up the Green Mountain Flyer train between the two cities in 1940, Fowler said. .
DeLabrure told VermontBiz that a possible reduction in running time “will be evaluated next summer after the train has been through different seasons.”
What’s next?
With the long-awaited Burlington launch behind it, the top priority for the VTrans commuter rail program is to extend service on the Washington, DC-St. Albans Vermonter, the state’s publicly funded rail, north to Montreal.
The state’s efforts to restore that relationship as early as 2012 have met with repeated challenges, including the creation of a customs pre-clearance facility at Montreal’s Central station. US and Canadian officials They agreed to build the facility in 2015.
“The work that’s going on in Canada is not something we want, need or direct,” VTrans Secretary Joe Flynn said at a meeting of the statutory Vermont Rail Advisory Council last December.
An Oct. 3 letter from VTrans director of policy, planning and intermodal development Michelle Baumhauer to the Federal Railroad Administration cited several other priorities for consideration for the federal passenger-rail grant program.
Ethan Allen’s priorities included an additional eight-mile extension from Burlington Union Station to Essex Junction, a Vermonter stop for the Burlington area.
Ethan Allen’s northern extension to Burlington missed the two pro-Vermonter towns at the crossroads of Essex because of their proximity to each other. But the new ridership figures clearly show that support in Burlington far outweighs that loss.
Connecting the two dots with Ethan Allen makes the Vermonter’s stand at the crossroads of Essex far superior in any way. The two trains follow very different itineraries going south, so their only common destination is New York’s Penn Station.
The Burlington-Essex Interchange extension would require upgrading the low-speed track that connects the two cities, via Winooski and Colchester.
Currently, freight trains only, this line can be considered a rail analog to the highway connection that I-189 provides between the US 7 and I-89 corridors on the other side of Burlington.
A 2017 study by VTrans put the cost of upgrading the track at $19.5 million, enough for major upgrades that would allow passenger trains to run on the track at 79 mph — a speed bump many described as “ridiculous” due to the speed limits, level crossings and curves along the route.
He took the view that a lower speed would be enough, and he needed less investment up front.
Closing the Burlington-Essex gap doesn’t appear to be imminent, but DeLabrure said VTrans didn’t have current cost estimates for any upgrades needed.
Either way, the inauguration of the Burlington service foreshadows much more to come for passenger rail travel in Vermont.
Aerial view of Amtrak’s Ethan Allen in Middlebury.
CB Hall is a freelance writer from Southern Vermont.
