It’s 8 a.m. in Oklahoma City. As many people across the metro are getting into their cars to take on the morning commute, dozens of travelers gathered at the Santa Fe Depot are preparing for a different kind of journey.
The Heartland Flyer is a passenger rail service run by Amtrak that connects Oklahoma City to Fort Worth, Texas. It began service in 1999, 20 years after passenger rail service in Oklahoma ended due to budget cuts.
“There was a 20-year gap in any sort of passenger rail service in Oklahoma because of cutbacks on train service in parts of the country. And a train which went from Chicago down into Texas, passing through Oklahoma City and other points, was taken off the system,” said Texas Rail Advocates president Peter LeCody.
A federal surplus in the late 90s led to special funding being given to states without Amtrak service for the purpose of starting one. LeCody said political support from the Oklahoma legislature spearheaded the effort.
“They said, let's bring this back. Let’s have a train here because people need to get from point A to point B and we just don't have too many other ways to handle that,” LeCody said.
Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said the Heartland Flyer has been a train of experimentation for the company. It was the first place Amtrak trialed e-ticketing, and another innovation was recognized in Time Magazine’s 50 Best Inventions of 2010.
“We were using biodiesel made from beef tallow to power the train as an experiment to see if in fact it made any difference in locomotive maintenance or mileage. And the good news is it really didn’t have really any effect on locomotive performance and the emissions were about the same, maybe a little better, but the cost of it was much higher than pure diesel back in the day when we did that,” Magliari said.
This train of experimentation has also been a train of evolution, especially when it comes to how it’s funded.
“Back in 2008, Congress decided routes of less than 750 miles need to be locally funded, whether it's coming from states or entities that are created to do this kind of work, or tribal entities, or MPOs. The feds decided back then that most of the cost after what ticket revenue brings in should be done locally, and that's how the flyer is funded,” he said.
Then, the Heartland Flyer was jointly funded by the Oklahoma and Texas Departments of Transportation. Michael Morris, the Director of Transportation for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, said that all changed last summer.
“We woke up last summer. Our legislature had finished its business in the May-June time frame, and a two-year funding request to pay that roughly $7 million, $3.5 million a year, for whatever reason got pulled. And for whatever reason the legislature didn’t fund it,” Morris said.
Morris said after learning about the sudden loss of funding, Texas mayors and other officials reached out to ask the council of governments if it could pull together emergency funding.
“There was a matter of maybe a few months to go. If someone didn't step in to pay for that service, the service would be truncated or terminated or no longer be in operation. And I felt on our watch, we need to keep hope alive,” he said.
Morris went to his board, the Regional Transportation Council, to figure out how it could keep the Heartland Flyer on the rails. They were able to pull from local toll revenue to fund the service for an additional year.
And while the train is still in operation despite it, LeCody said the loss of funding from the Texas legislature is concerning.
“It's very disheartening that all of a sudden, after all these years, there's folks in Austin at the Texas legislature that said, we don't think this is a good investment. That could be no further from the truth,” LeCody said.
See part two of this three-part series on Tuesday, April 7.
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