7/8/20

Big Sky Rail Authority now at seven Montana counties


Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) and this blog follow each other on Twitter. As rail coal traffic dies Tester wants to restore the North Coast Hiawatha line after Amtrak ended service in 1979 or about the time an interested party moved to Missoula from Deadwood. Amtrak struggled with service on the Empire Builder through Montana during the Bakken boom and still suffers congestion through North Dakota.

Meanwhile the Trump Organization is pledging to kill passenger rail service while vehicle traffic between the Black Hills, Cheyenne and Denver continues to increase just like it is between Denver, Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Douglas and Gillette, Wyoming continue to kill people and strangle traffic so passenger rail would bring some order to that chaos. Many get the idea of a future I-25E but now is the time to connect the Southwest Chief to the Empire Builder at Shelby, Montana through Denver, Cheyenne and Gillette, too. It would intersect with the North Coast Hiawatha line at Laurel, Montana.

Game of Thrones author George RR Martin and two other New Mexico celebrities have purchased the Santa Fe Southern Railroad and the depot in Lamy. The State of New Mexico bought the track bed that Amtrak's Southwest Chief uses from just north of Lamy to Behlen south of Albuquerque from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway when the Rail Runner was built. BNSF owns virtually all the rail rights of way in New Mexico. Two congressional neighbors now Democratic governors in Colorado and New Mexico have been pledging to develop passenger rail along the Front Range and southern Rockies. SFSR was featured in the Breaking Bad episode, Dead Freight.
Last week, Commissioner Dave Strohmaier announced that Dawson County had opted to join the upstart Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority. Since then, both Sanders and Park counties have signed on, pushing the authority beyond the threshold of counties needed to create it. “It’s very promising,” Strohmaier said on Monday. “I’m 99.9% confident that it’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of when, and I think the when will be in the month of July.” Missoula County in early June adopted a draft resolution for the passenger rail authority. It sent the draft to the nearly two dozen counties poised along the old North Coast Hiawatha route once used by Amtrak. Amtrak ran the North Coast Hiawatha across Montana’s southern tier from 1971 to 1979. The route included Miles City, Billings, Livingston, Bozeman, Helena, Missoula and Paradise, among other communities. [Missoula Current]

1 comment:

larry kurtz said...

11 Montana counties are now in.