SUNDAY BLOG
With all of the bad news, how about some good news for a Sunday. It comes via an article that CB Hall wrote for Crosscut on the efforts of citizens in the Olympia-Lacey area who built and maintain their Amtrak train station. No help came from the federal government or Amtrak.
Twenty-five years ago, Amtrak patrons traveling to or from Washington's capital city — which the tracks bypass — had to contend with a station designated as East Olympia. In a recent interview, Lloyd Flem, Olympia resident and dean of Washington state's passenger rail activists, recalled the station as “a little three-sided shack. ... The potholes in the parking lot would sometimes be a foot deep — no restrooms, no nothing. It would have made maybe a half-way decent farm stand.”
The station, adjacent to a gated road crossing, was also very dangerous. “There were several people killed at East Olympia, in several accidents,” said Bob Bregent, a locomotive engineer from Olympia who managed Centennial Station's construction. “People would go around the down gate and they'd hit a freight coming on the other main track. They thought they only had to circumvent the passenger train stopped next to the crossing.”
The tipping point came when one incident provoked a passenger to speak out, helping bring about action. In a letter which reached the Thurston County Commission, it was reported that: "Late one night in 1986, Amtrak's Los Angeles-Seattle Coast Starlight train, running way behind schedule, dropped off a wheelchair-bound man at the East Olympia shack. No one was around, and the often-vandalized pay phone apparently wasn't working. The man spent the entire night at the station, helpless."
Then Thurston County Commissioner George Barner decided enough is enough. Barner decided to take action, convening a meeting that led to the founding of the nonprofit Amtrak Depot Committee.
Thurston County donated a highway maintenance depot, two miles northeast along the Burlington Northern tracks from East Olympia, and a local farmer contributed some adjacent land, giving the station a site of some five acres. Some 2,500 paving bricks were sold at $35 to $50 apiece, while marble plaques were minted for larger, business donors. The local contractors' trade association donated time and material. An architect contributed drawings. Bregent would show up with half a dozen volunteer nail-pounders on Saturdays and Sundays.
The station and adjoining park-and-ride cost, depending on the accounting one consults, between $600,000 and $1 million, exclusive of all the donated labor and materials. The federal government — meaning Amtrak — didn't put in a dime. In comparions, an Amtrak station in Stanwood, minimal in design and opened in 2009, cost roughly $5 million dollars, all of it public money. The budget for the new Sounder-Amtrak station in Tukwila is $18 million.
By replacing the lean-to at East Olympia, Centennial gave Amtrak ridership in and out of Olympia a major boost. How much money the station project has thus put in Amtrak's coffers no one can say, but the presence of anytime-we-are-needed volunteers has certainly removed any need for Amtrak to install its own paid staff, as the station's traffic volume would otherwise have called for. That saves Amtrak about $150,000 a year, according to Rich DeGarmo, a retired pharmacist who supervises the 60 volunteers who operate Centennial Station.
The Amtrak system has at least three stations run by volunteers — including the Kelso-Longview depot, where Olympia's volunteers, aided by the 40-page training manual they have written for new workers, helped get the volunteers going in 2011. A station in Missouri also runs on volunteers.
As we have to tighten our belts to reduce our federal deficit, the folks in Olympia-Lacey and Kelso-Longview are solving problems and helping their fellow citizens using their own elbow grease and time. Isn't that what America is all about?
Don C. Brunell, President (DonB@awb.org)