If you look at Amtrak’s national network on a map, you will see a giant hole spanning roughly a third of the contiguous United States. Two states in this area, Wyoming and South Dakota, have no intercity passenger rail service at all. The lone route that crosses the northern tier of the country through Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota lies far away from most of the major cities in each state.
For almost a century, traveling by rail in these places was about as commonplace as it is today in many other parts of the world, if not more so. In Episode 2 of our main series, we explored how public investment in competing modes of transportation in the twentieth century gradually undermined the ability of railroads to provide service at a profit. The episode left off in 1970, when the federal government created Amtrak to relieve the private sector of their historic obligation to move people. In our forthcoming third episode, we will learn how Amtrak was created with a contradictory mandate: to earn a profit while providing an essential public service that had become unprofitable in most places.
One of the results of this mandate was that large swaths of the country lost access to service. Many places lost it on Amtrak’s first day, when half of the passenger trains previously operating on the U.S. network were yanked overnight. Many more places lost service in the years that followed, as these remaining connections came into conflict with the insistence that passenger rail turn a profit.
The route connecting Chicago and Seattle through the southern tier of Montana holds the unique distinction of being discontinued twice in the Amtrak era. Under the auspices of the North Coast Limited, trains had traversed this corridor since 1900. The decision to cut the route from Amtrak’s initial system, which went into effect on May 1, 1971, caused such an uproar that trains were back up and running on the route about six weeks later. But it was not to last. The re-branded North Coast Hiawatha was discontinued once again in 1979.
Today, the route is on the verge of another comeback. The organization behind it all is the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority (BSPRA), a public rail authority formed in 2020 by a joint resolution of 12 counties in Montana, with the stated mission of restoring service to the southern tier of the state. One of the leading figures behind this effort is Dave Strohmaier, chair of BSPRA and chair of the Missoula County Board of Commissioners.
In this Rail Bite, Mr. Strohmaier pays homage to the impressive—and perhaps surprising—array of constituents that are coming together to drive the effort forward. Whereas the loss of service 46 years ago contributed to a “palpable sense of loss” and disenfranchisement—part and parcel of a broader trend—the effort to revive it has become a source of connection in divisive times.
Our new Rail Bites series presents you with some of our favorite clips from our amazing guests on Reconnect America. With Rail Bites, you can look forward to more frequent, shorter-form content in between our carefully crafted longer episodes.
Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.
Learn more, get involved and pitch in to support the work of Solutionary Rail at SolutionaryRail.org. Keep the podcast ads-free and without paywalls by making a tax-deductible donation HERE.
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