The Sun Valley City Council last week approved a resolution calling for the return of Amtrak passenger train service to Idaho, specifically to Shoshone, an hour's drive away.
Idaho's Republican Sen. Mike Crapo is pushing the idea in Congress of resurrecting Amtrak's Pioneer line, which was killed in 1997—the victim of millions of dollars in losses and bad management.
Yet, the Intermountain West doesn't need just any old train. It needs a well-run, modern and properly funded passenger train with sufficient government subsidies—just like cars and trucks that are subsidized with publicly funded highways. Otherwise, it will fail again.
Trains inspire a lot of longing among Americans who have visited Europe because they know how nice and relatively easy traveling by train can be.
Sun Valley owes its very existence to trains because in 1936, Union Pacific Railroad's Averell Harriman bet that building a destination ski resort in Sun Valley would lure passengers. It did, but time passed, patterns changed, and service to Ketchum ended in the late 1970s.
Americans left trains behind in favor of more convenient cars and freeways, and blindingly fast jet planes.
Passenger trains became rattletraps--neglected by a nation that owed to them the opening of the entire modern American West. Passenger service eventually was left to Amtrak, a government-owned corporation.
When Amtrak served Shoshone, passengers could catch the train only in the middle of the night after waiting in a poorly lit, drafty shed that resembled a rickety bus stop.
The passenger cars themselves also had little to recommend them. The seats were shabby, the food was awful and sleeper cars were nonexistent. Passengers traveled sitting up on a slow and grimy conveyance run by a company that seemed never to have heard that customer satisfaction was something to which it should aspire—or that trains should run on time.
The romantic allure of train travel in the Intermountain West was driven to absolutely zero for everyone except those besotted by the romantic history of trains.
If the Pioneer line comes back to Idaho, it will fail again unless Amtrak provides comfortable, fast and frequent service with customers in mind.
All of the paper resolutions, popular politics and energy efficiency in the world won't make it so. It will take a lot of money, good equipment and excellent management.
Done right, passenger rail service could benefit Sun Valley's and Idaho's economy. Bad service isn't worth revisiting.
