Governor Howard Dean, in green sitting next to Governor Phil Scott, listens to remarks by Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner. VermontBiz photo.
by C.B. Hall, Vermont Business Magazine Passenger trains began serving Vermont's largest city in 1849, when rail routes were completed from White River Junction and Rutland by the rival Central Vermont and Rutland and Burlington railroads, respectively. The R&B got to Burlington first, with an inaugural departure on December 24. The CV's first train pulled out the next day – Christmas.
The R&B had its first depot near the corner of what are now Battery and Maple streets, while the CV's long-vanished route looped through the heart of what is now Burlington's downtown, with a depot on a site that currently accommodates the city's library. Via onward connections from Rutland, the R&B offered a ride to Boston for the princely sum of six dollars.
For many decades, passenger traffic was abundant – and there was plenty of milk and butter for the freights to carry – but better roads, the advent of automobiles and trucks, and, at least for the Rutland, a succession of labor disputes began to take their toll in the first half of the 20th century.
With the once-humming passenger traffic at Burlington Union Station having withered to just three round-trip trains a day, a strike in 1953 delivered the final blow, and the Rutland jettisoned its increasingly unprofitable passenger service entirely.
The Rutland continued as a freight-only line, but ceased to operate altogether in 1961, when another strike administered the coup de gras. In 1963 the state stepped in and bought much of the abandoned railroad's track infrastructure, including the Westside Corridor, which runs from Burlington to North Bennington and on to Hoosick Junction, New York.
That same year, the Vermont Railway was established to operate traffic on the corridor under a lease from the state. In the late 1990s, the Vermont Rail System was formed as an umbrella company that today encompasses the Vermont Railway as well as other routes in New York and Vermont.
Rutland went 43 years without any passenger service, until Amtrak's Ethan Allen Express began plying its route between that city and New York City's Penn Station. The 1996 service launch reflected efforts led by Republican Senator Jim Jeffords and his aide Jeff Munger, state representative Curt McCormack (D-Rutland), and Democrat Howard Dean, then the governor.
In an interview for this article, Dean described the development of the Ethan Allen as "sort of a classic major transportation project... When we started it, it was clearly ahead of its time. These projects have such a long lead time that they have to be ahead of their time."
He dated the initiative's origins to the mid-1980s, when he and other state legislators from both major parties formed an informal coalition, the "blue shirts," who "talked a lot about future projects," Amtrak service to Rutland and Burlington, known today as the Ethan Allen Express, being one of them.
He hastened to share credit for the Burlington service launch with several other political players.
Senators Dick Mazza and Jane Kitchell get comfortable on the first passenger train to leave Burlington in 69 years. C.B. Hall photo.
"This project wouldn't have happened without Dick Mazza, because he kept it alive after I left," Dean said, referring to his 1991-2003 governorship. Mazza, a Colchester Democrat, has chaired the Senate Transportation Committee since 1991.
But, Dean added, "None of this has to do with Republican or Democrat, I think. This probably wouldn't be happening without Republican help, too."
"It's been one of my prime projects for the last 30 years," Mazza said in an interview aboard the July 29 inaugural run of the extended Ethan Allen. "Couldn't be more pleased to see it happen."
"A Bit Of A Sea Change"
The nonpartisan flavor of the project manifested itself in Jeffords, who left the Republican
Party in 2001 to become an independent who caucused with the Democrats. When he retired in 2007, Munger stayed on at Jeffords' Washington office, with a new boss in the person of independent socialist Bernie Sanders.
Asked when the push to restore service north of Rutland began in earnest, Williston-based passenger rail advocate Carl Fowler referred to a $30 million federal earmark obtained by Jeffords in 2005 for improvements on the corridor.
"The VTrans administration of the day was in my personal opinion not terribly interested in it," Fowler said, referring to the Agency of Transportation.
The money was not immediately put to use, and in 2008, citing the $1.5 million annual state subsidy for the train, the administration of Republican governor Jim Douglas, Dean's successor, proposed replacing the Ethan Allen temporarily with a bus.
Skeptical of the "temporary" nature of the bus replacement, activists from the Vermont Rail Action Network, along with legislators and municipal officials in Rutland County, fought successfully to keep the train running.
"Jim clearly had very little interest in rail, and his transportation department didn't, either," Dean said. Douglas could not be reached for comment.
With the train preserved, Fowler said, "attitudes at VTrans underwent a bit of a sea change... Things really did start to turn around." He cited the arrival of Chris Cole and then Joe Flynn as agency's secretaries, and of Dan Delabruere, the agency's chief rail officer, as giving the Ethan Allen project impetus.
More money began to flow into the effort, and over the ensuing dozen years the corridor was upgraded to allow passenger trains to chug along at 59 mph in open country. Bridges were improved and sidings were installed where freight trains can wait, or unused freight cars can be stored, while passenger trains go by.
In 2017 the Vergennes station, built about 1851, was moved a quarter-mile north from its original location to a park-and-ride facility just over the city line in Ferrisburgh, where the Italianate structure has since been attractively restored.
That station entered history in 1859, when John Brown's a-moldering body, accompanied by his widow, arrived by train from the South shortly after he was hanged for his raid on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
According to Vermont Civil War historian Howard Coffin, quite a crowd made its way to the depot. Some used pocketknives to chip off bits of the box containing the abolitionist's casket as mementos before it continued on its way across Lake Champlain to its final resting place in North Elba, New York.
Burlington Union Station has a history to boast of, too. After seven years of planning and construction, it opened to the public in 1916. Architect Alfred Fellheimer, who had been the lead architect for Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal, gave the Burlington station a symmetrical Beaux Arts look, and the Burlington Daily Free Press touted his creation as "probably the finest railroad station in northern New England.”
The structure served the traveling public until the demise of the Rutland's passenger service in 1953. Green Mountain Power purchased the building in 1955, and in 1985 sold it to the Alden Waterfront Company as part of a planned waterfront redevelopment.
Alden became Main Street Landing, which actively promoted the return of the passenger service to the city, among other things by building the ticket counter that will serve Amtrak patrons henceforward. MSL continues to own the property except for part of its ground floor, which the development company sold in 2016 to the Vermont Agency of Transportation as a station facility for the Ethan Allen.
Today, while the three passenger tracks of the station's heyday are but a memory, the station anchors a lively waterfront that attracts tourists and locals alike to the city's main bicycle path, parks, and Echo, the Leahy Center for Lake Champlain, as well as the inspiring company of the lake itself.
Melinda Moulton, MSL's former CEO, called the work leading up to the July 29 restoration of Burlington service "a long slog. For 35 years Main Street Landing has envisioned this return of passenger rail to the west side of Vermont, and has worked diligently and patiently for this exciting day, to see this vision and this dream come true, of rail service as a sustainable transportation mode and a boon for the city of Burlington."
The Link LonkJuly 30, 2022 at 05:50AM
https://vermontbiz.com/news/2022/july/29/amtrak-little-history
Amtrak: A little history - Vermont Biz
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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