Efforts to Save Ticket Offices Will Fail

The outcry in some places following the news that Amtrak plans to close 15 ticket offices nationwide between now and late June took me back about 40 years to when the carrier planned to close its ticket office in my hometown in Illinois.

I was a young reporter for the newspaper in Mattoon, Illinois, when I got a phone call one day from one of the Amtrak ticket agents assigned to that city’s station telling me about the plans to not only close the ticket office, but the station itself.

Mattoon is a stop on the former Illinois Central between Chicago and New Orleans and the station there once housed various railroad offices. But all of those had closed by the time I got that phone call.

In Mattoon, as in countless other cities, Amtrak was the sole user of a station that was a relic of another era and had more space than the passenger carrier would ever need.

The plan in Mattoon was to build an “Amshack” at the north end of the Illinois Central Gulf yard next to the only grade crossing in town on the ICG’s Chicago-New Orleans mainline.

The agent had spoken to me on what reporters call “deep background” but the public might know as “off the record.”

I took the news tip and ran with it, calling Amtrak’s PR person in Chicago and getting confirmation that, yes, indeed, my information was correct.

The story I wrote for the newspaper prompted city officials to protest the move. I wrote subsequent stories about meetings, phone calls and letter writing campaigns and in the end Amtrak backed down.

An Amtrak official claimed that business had improved in Mattoon, but I suspect there was more to it than that. Political pressure can be a powerful thing in motivating Amtrak’s behavior.

Also, I found during my journalism career that organizations seldom like to acknowledge the so-called power of the press.

The Amtrak ticket office in Mattoon remained open for several more years and I got to know all three agents who worked there. They were a valuable source of information about Amtrak.

I moved on in my career in 1983 and a few years later Amtrak closed the Mattoon ticket office. There is no correlation between my leaving the ticket office closing.

Organizations have a way of doing sooner or later what they want to do.

The Mattoon ticket office was not the first to close on the Chicago-Carbondale-New Orleans route.

Offices at Kankakee, Rantoul and Effingham, to name a few, had closed before Mattoon’s did.

Today, the only intermediate ticket offices still open on the former Mainline of Mid-America are in Champaign-Urbana, Carbondale, Memphis, Jackson and Hammond. The latter, though, is among those slated to close by late June.

Officials in some of the 15 cities where Amtrak ticket agents are set to be pulled are waging campaigns not unlike the one that played out in Mattoon many years ago.

None of those efforts is going to ultimately succeed.

It will be difficult to prevail in the face of Amtrak’s argument that nine of every 10 tickets are sold online. Who needs a ticket agent?

I also wonder how many political officials will take seriously some of the arguments being made by those rail passenger advocates trying to save the ticket offices.

Sure, letters will be written, resolutions passed and phone calls made. But in the end the offices are going to close because it’s tough to thwart the religion of cost cutting.

Amtrak is closing these offices to save money. It is not part of a plot by a former airline CEO to kill long-distance trains as some rail advocates are contending even if other moves Amtrak is making seemingly point in that direction.

Amtrak has been closing ticket offices for decades and the majority of stations served by long-distance trains do not have a ticket office and haven’t had one for many years.

Whatever political pressure that officials might bring against Amtrak to keep the ticket offices open will fade quickly in the face of the “nine of every 10” ticket sales argument and assurances by Amtrak officials that a caretaker will keep the station waiting room open at train time, keep it clean, and assist passengers.

The latter is significant because if there is one group of people who need assistance it is the elderly and physically challenged.

But I wonder how long it will be until the caretakers that Amtrak says it is hiring at the 15 stations losing their agents will themselves face the budget knife.

In Amtrak’s ideal world a unit of local government or a developer owns the stations it serves at intermediate points and underwrites most of the cost of maintaining that facility.

Otherwise, Amtrak will put up a bus shelter-type facility that receives minimal, if any, maintenance.

I understand why some are protesting the removing of ticket agents because there is something of value being lost. It is just that those who need or benefit from that are a small minority of Amtrak passengers.

Mattoon may have lost its ticket agent back in the late 1980s, but it kept its station. The city eventually bought it and spent millions to restore it.

Today it houses the Coles County Historical Society and an Amtrak waiting room.

I’ve passed through that station dozens of times over the past 20 years after traveling to Mattoon by train to visit my Dad.

I’ve never seen evidence that not having a ticket agent has depressed ridership from Mattoon.

If you need to know where the train is, you can call Amtrak Julie on your cellphone. If you have a Smartphone, you can even go to the Amtrak website and see for yourself where the train is at any given moment.

Mattoon learned to live without an Amtrak agent as have hundreds of other places. So will 15 other cities that are about to have the same experience.

Sanders Speaks to NYC Convention

Akron Railroad Club President Craig Sanders gave a presentation on the New York Central’s St. Louis line on Sunday to the annual New York Central System Historical Society, which met over the weekend in Independence.

Sanders spoke about the history of the line, particularly in his hometown of Mattoon, Illinois.

He illustrated his presentation with historic images and presented some here and now scenes to show how the railroad right of way has changed.

The St. Louis line of the New York Central was built in the mid 1850s between Terre Haute, Indiana, and Alton, Illinois.

It later became part of the Big Four, which was leased by the New York Central in 1930.

Conrail abandoned the line between Paris and Pana, Illinois, in March 1982. The tracks through Mattoon were removed in May 1983.

Since then, virtually all traces of the former NYC in Mattoon, including the passenger station, shops, Railway Express Building and the bridge over the Illinois Central mainline, have been razed.

A portion of the yard and shops is now a softball fields complex known as the Roundhouse Complex because it is located where the 21-stall roundhouse used to be.

One Day in May the Railroad Went Away

A former Pennsylvania Railroad cabin car bears witness to the removal of a former New York Central route. West of Terre Haute at least, the Pennsy won one. It was a different story east of there where the Central survived.

It was a mostly sunny spring day. My recollection is that it was late afternoon when I drove out on Illinois Route 16 west of Mattoon, Ill., to look for a Conrail rail train.

The line had been abandoned more than a year earlier, but by law Conrail had to wait at least 120 days in case someone wanted to buy it. There had been talk of that, but nothing materialized.

On this day the rails were being removed to be sent somewhere to be refurbished and, eventually, reused.

My mission was to make a few photographs to document the rail removal.

This day had been years in the making. It began when Penn Central decided it didn’t need two routes between Terre Haute and St. Louis.

PC had expected to abandon or dramatically downgrade the former New York Central route, but that didn’t happen.

Even with a mandate to rationalize the rail network that it inherited from PC, it took Conrail seven years to finish the job.

I didn’t spend much time at the site where the workers were pulling up the rails.

I didn’t have the documentary mindset that I have now. Back then, making photographs was a sometime thing.

How I wish today that I had done more to document the abandonment of a rail line that had played a significant role in my life.

It was over these rails that I made my first railroad journey in the 1950s aboard an NYC passenger train to St. Louis.

I saw these rails often as I went about my life activities while growing up and later working in Mattoon.

As a reporter for the Mattoon Journal Gazette I had written about the process that led to the ex-NYC being abandoned between Paris and Pana, Ill.

But when the rail train came through Mattoon to pick up the rail, I was at home. I made no effort to go see, let alone photograph, the rail removal operation in my hometown.

I must have figured that the photographs that I made the day before west of town were a good enough record.

Today you would hardly know there had been a railroad here. Farmers have claimed the right of way and extended their fields.

The only traces of the railroad are a few small concrete bridges left behind and linear empty space in the towns where the rails had been.

Shown are a few of the better images that I made on that 1983 day. They were scanned from the original color print film negatives.

For the most part, I consider these images to be nothing special. Most of them are not composed well.

And yet they are very special because they show something that happened once and won’t happen again. They have historical significance.

Regardless of the quality of these images, I’m very pleased that I made them.

Article and Photographs by Craig Sanders

The lead locomotive of the last train to travel over the rails of the former New York Central mainline west of my hometown of Mattoon, Ill. For the record, the direction of travel was east.

After getting fixed up, these rails will be put down again elsewhere on the Conrail system.

Just another day of picking up rail on just another Conrail abandonment. A lot of those occurred during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

A side portrait of No. 1921, the trailing unit in the rail train.

It would have been appropriate had the lead locomotive been 1855, the year that these rails reached Mattoon from the east.

All that was left behind was some ballast, ties and tie plates. Crews will be back later to pick that up. Today the ex-NYC right of way is part of a farm field and you might not know that a railroad once ran here that hosted the Central’s finest passenger trains between New York and St. Louis.

Waiting For The Harvest Season to Begin

A caboose and string of covered hopper cars wait at Jones Switch for the call to be pulled down to a nearby elevator to be filled with grain.

I don’t know who Jones was and why a switch on the old Peoria, Decatur & Evansville was named after him.

I just know that for as long as I can remember there has been a grain elevator southeast of my hometown of Mattoon, Ill., at a place called Jones Switch.

Today Interstate 57 goes practically over the top of Jones Switch. The PD&E, which was acquired by the Illinois Central Railroad early in the 20^th century is mostly gone east of Jones switch.

A portion of the PD&E remains in place from the Canadian National yard in Mattoon – what’s left of it anyway – out to the elevator at Jones Switch.

Traffic on this spur probably is sporadic. A week or more might go by without any trains moving over these tracks.

I left in Mattoon since 1983 and don’t get back there much so I don’t know how often that trains operate on this line.

I do know that the last two times that I saw Jones switch there was a string of covered hopper cars parked to the west and an IC caboose wearing the IC “death star” logo was being used as a shoving platform for CN crews backing the hoppers out to the elevator.

As far as I know, the occasional move of covered hoppers is the only traffic still left on this segment of the old PD&E.

There are countless locations such as Jones Switch scattered all over America. A branch line or a portion of a branch line remains in place to serve a particular customer or two that needs rail service.

The distance between the Mattoon yard and Jones Switch is a couple miles or so and the track is not in the best condition.

I have to wonder how much longer that CN will agree to move covered hoppers over this stretch without some track rehabilitation.

Whatever the case, I made it a point to visit Jones Switch last month during a visit back to Mattoon this past August  to do some railfanning of the former IC.

The caboose I had seen two years earlier on these tracks was there along with a string of covered hoppers. The elevator owns or leases a geep painted solid blue that has had its markings and numbers removed.

The diesel was silent and I didn’t observe any activity at the grain elevator.

The only sounds came from traffic rushing by on the interstate and the wind rustling the corn plants next to the tracks. Some of that grain might move over these very tracks in a couple more months.

But the corn was still quite green and would need more than a month to mature and be ready for harvest.

So everything waits for its time. The caboose, the covered hoppers and the blue geep will soon enough have work to do.

Article and Photographs by Craig Sanders

Rust is threatening to overcome the IC’s gray paint.

Some of the corn growing next to the tracks may well journey to market over those tracks and maybe even in these cars.

CN train crews are not allowed to go all the way to Jones’ switch.

The heritage of this locomotive is a mystery, what with its markings and numbers having been removed.

What tales could this geep tell of places its been and worked?

The elevator at Jones Switch looms in the background over Interstate 57. These tracks once went all the way to Evansville, Ind.

Need a used tractor? It still has lots of life left in it.