Some background on why the push for this is happening now:
-- St. Lawrence & Atlantic RR is owned by
Gennessee & Wyoming, a conglomerate of a zillion shortline freight railroads across the U.S. and Canada. They're known as a very good operator...focused, efficient, makes mind-boggling profits as a corporation despite each individual line being an itty bitty isolated operation. StL&A is a typical G&W subsidiary: they keep their mainline in immaculate condition, they're efficient and good with customer service, they always turn a profit. And...they're a nearly invisible afterthought vs. the region's big boys.
-- Last year G&W pulled off a mega-merger to buy the 2nd largest shortline conglomerate in the country, RailAmerica. That deal brought NECR, the 4th largest regional carrier in New England and the Vermonter's host railroad, into the fold. As well as Connecticut Southern, which is the freight operator for the Springfield Line.
-- With the merger they've now got very large New England presence and are making moves to integrate those 3 currently disconnected carriers. Streamlining operations, sharing equipment, and cutting deals with other carriers so they can move goods outside their territory. For example, NECR and Providence & Worcester RR now have a 'coopetition' arrangement to move goods (primarily autoracks) from Canada to Port of Davisville in Providence to get them better rates avoiding CSX and Pan Am. They're seeking similar arrangements to link CT Southern with NECR and make StL&A a bigger competitive threat to Pan Am in Maine.
-- They're
very passenger-friendly. NECR and CT Southern have longstanding, very positive working relationships with Amtrak over the Vermonter. Common ownership now makes StL&A a familiar and non-scary prospect for Amtrak to do business with.
Most of you have heard of NECR's Central Corridor proposal to run their own passenger trains on the cheap between Amherst, Palmer and New London. This is StL&A's play for the same thing. They eagerly want to bait passenger traffic as leverage for public-funded freight track upgrades, and are pitching the very good condition of their track as a low barrier of entry. NECR has track that's for the most part 60 MPH passenger end-to-end. StL&A has track that's for the most part 40 MPH passenger (and wouldn't take a crushing sum of money to get to 60 MPH). Since they're very efficiency-minded, they run long trains fewer times per day and would have a lot of schedule slots to give to passenger trains (I think StL&A only does 1 large round-trip per day, with run-as-directeds only as necessary).
-- The border crossing and Customs clearance process may get improved soon, eliminating that projected 2 hour wait at the border. Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont has legislation in U.S. Senate committee to streamline and institute Customs pre-clearance procedures for intercity trains that cross the border but do not have stops right at the border for a Customs checkpoint like the Adirondack, Maple Leaf, and Empire to Niagra Falls do. His self-interest in pursuing that is to get his state pork for reinstating the Montrealer, but if Congress ever gets moving enough to pick this up out of committee it'll offer up a lot of new route options that haven't been available post-9/11 and should pick up a decent amount of bipartisan support.
While they have to state that 2-hour wait now in the proposal because the legislation is unsettled, clearly they are hedging that pre-clearance and elimination of that border wait can come to this route by or soon after its launch date.
-- Big changes are coming to Maine's rail network. That awful train disaster in Quebec this summer with the exploding oil train has bankrupted Montreal, Maine & Atlantic RR, which runs the competing east-west int'l route across Quebec and northern Maine. They are about to be split up by the bankruptcy court amongst one or several bidders with their Quebec, Maine, and Vermont lines changing hands. Most likely to much more reputable carriers than notoriously skinflint and unsafe MM&A. All of the freight carriers in Maine like Pan Am and StL&A are jockeying for position to either buy those lines outright or divert traffic off them to their mainlines. As is NECR trying to divert more traffic through VT.
You can see there's a convergence of events happening right now that explains some of the timing of the public announcement re: passenger service. Everyone's got big skin in the game. Including Pan Am, which is playing both offense and defense in Maine.
-- Note also that the MM&A mainline is an ex-passenger route itself. VIA Rail (Canada's Amtrak) ran the
Atlantic route from Montreal to Halifax 3 days a week here until 1994, with 6 intermediate stops in Maine. New Brunswick province and Eastern Quebec are still ripshit over the budget cuts that cancelled the service, with secessionists seizing on that as Exhibit Y of Ontario shitting all over the Maritimes and Quebec. Touched some political third rails over there, and the provinces have been loudly lobbying for its restoration ever since.
This obviously plays into Maine's hands at expanding their passenger network, even though the Atlantic never reached Portland and is unrelated to this POR-MTL proposal. Lots of public money in Canada is going towards rebuilding the town leveled by that rail tanker disaster, and whoever buys MM&A is probably going to get courtesy of lots of $$$ to repair that line. MaineDOT will have their say too. And there is potential if the Atlantic were ever to rise from the ashes of a future Downeaster extension to Augusta or Bangor having connecting service up to Brownville to link the two routes. Or an insta-implementation motorcoach out of Portland ferrying passengers up 95 between the Downeaster and Atlantic a la the Amtrak Thruway coaches out west that fill in by-bus some broken links between nearby train routes.
So again...convergence of events explaining some of the timing. POR-MTL, the wheeling and dealing with freights on the ex-Atlantic route, the ever-expanding Downeaster proposals. Individually some of these proposals might be meh on the merits (and I do think it's too soon for POR-MTL), but collectively it's building momentum across a wide regional swath of 2 countries with a whole slew of stakeholders aggressively plotting their chess moves. You can throw the Vermonter/Montrealer into this whole mix too with the Customs legislation, the Gennessee & Wyoming conglomerate, and the pre-existing Amtrak relationships with some of these parties.
Which projects get prioritized is open for a big, long debate. But it's a big, sprawling puzzle with a lot of pieces coming into place and big shifts about to go down with all the major freight carriers in Northern NE and Quebec over business deals.
So...just a little background on the motivations for them pimping this proposal right now as opposed to some other time.
