In Brief:
- Amtrak restored Gulf Coast service this summer, two decades after it was halted by Hurricane Katrina.
- Gulf Coast cities in Mississippi are hoping for a tourism boost.
- Ridership is outpacing Amtrak’s projections in the first weeks of service.
The last time Amtrak ran a passenger train between New Orleans and Mobile, Ala., it was a one-off demonstration train in 2016, carrying rail advocates, congresspeople, and local officials hoping to build momentum for restoring a service that had ended with Hurricane Katrina.
For that occasion, Andrew Gilich, the mayor of Biloxi, Miss., provided dozens of pounds of crawfish to serve to his fellow passengers as they rolled along the Gulf Coast, waving to residents gathered near the former stations. Crawfish weren’t in season this August, when Amtrak officially started twice-a-day service along the route, just a few days shy of Katrina’s 20th anniversary. So Gilich, whom everybody calls “Fofo,” opted instead for about 60 pounds of Gulf shrimp, “boiled and seasoned to perfection,” as he joined many of the same advocates from nine years ago for the inaugural trip.
“It is so relaxing to be on that train. You see an eagle. You see an osprey,” says Gilich, who, at 77 years old, has been Biloxi’s mayor since 2015. “This just adds to the opportunity to visit our coast.”
Amtrak’s newest passenger line, called the Mardi Gras Service, restores a link that was lost when Katrina damaged much of the infrastructure that supported passenger trains running along the Gulf. (Mobile, founded 16 years before New Orleans in 1702, claims the country’s oldest Mardi Gras celebration.) For the better part of the last 20 years, advocates, including the mayors of Gulf Coast towns with former station stops, members of the Southern Rail Commission, and Republican U.S. senator from Mississippi Roger Wicker, have been pushing to bring the service back. That effort has required tedious negotiations with CSX and Norfolk Southern, the freight railroad carriers which own much of the railway between Mobile and New Orleans, as well as much of the rest of the country.
Over the last few years, as Amtrak pressed its case to restore service on the route before the Surface Transportation Board, additional funding has helped ease negotiations. A $178 million federal grant helped pay for safety improvements, and a vote by the Mobile City Council to provide $3 million in operating funding helped get the deal over the finish line. Backers say the restoration of the service is a landmark moment in the Gulf’s post-Katrina recovery and an economic boost to hard-hit towns on the Mississippi coast.
“It opens up those towns to a whole new visitor and it also takes advantage of the investments in those cities that have been made after Katrina,” says Knox Ross, chairman of the Southern Rail Commission. “The whole point of investing in a service like this is to get some kind of overall economic return.”
The first month of operations has been fairly successful. The trains carried a combined 447 passengers a day, on average, in the first two weeks of service. Amtrak has added an additional car on days when the New Orleans Saints play at home because demand has been so high.
“It’s very much exceeding even our rosiest projection,” Ross says. “It’s running, right now, over double the Amtrak projection. … Some trips are sold out or close to sold out. During the weekends it’s a hot ticket.”
Levee failures during the Hurricane Katrina storm surge caused catastrophic flooding and over a thousand deaths in the city of New Orleans. But it was the Mississippi coast that took the direct hit of the hurricane. Thousands of homes were destroyed and thousands more sustained major damage. In Pascagoula, on the eastern edge of Mississippi’s coast, around 90 percent of the town was flooded.
“We had the force of the hurricane in Mississippi,” says Jay Willis, Pascagoula’s mayor. “We were like 50 miles away from the center and we still had 22 feet of storm surge.”
Pascagoula is home to a major oil refinery, a Rolls-Royce propellor manufacturing facility, a Bollinger shipbuilding hub and other heavy industrial sites. Getting those job centers up and running was the first priority of the recovery.
“First you’ve got to get people back to work, then you’ve got to get the schools open,” Willis says. “Rail service was missed when it was gone after Katrina, but that was somewhat the least of our concerns.”
Just half a decade after Katrina, the BP oil spill did further damage to the Gulf Coast’s fishing and tourism industries. But in recent years, money from a $20 billion oil-spill settlement has helped coastal cities reinvest in certain areas, including their downtowns. Pascagoula has used some of that funding to improve its riverfront area. And it’s promoted new developments downtown targeted at increasing tourism, including a nearly finished project to remake the historic train station with a restaurant and microbrewery. The train service itself won’t radically alter the city’s trajectory, Willis says. But it will make it a more attractive place to live.
“What we know it’s already doing is enhancing the quality of life for our residents,” he says. Not only does the station make Pascagoula accessible to a new group of tourists, but it opens the Gulf Coast up to people who already live there. It may take a bit longer to get to New Orleans on the train than in a car, but not much — and the experience is better. “You sit on the train having a snack and an adult beverage and you get to downtown New Orleans,” he says. “It’s a whole lot different than sitting in traffic with 18-wheelers and so on.”
While most of the Gulf Coast lacks robust public transit service, new services are providing golf cart connections to local destinations in some towns, including Mobile and Gulfport, Miss. Of course, ridership on the train is a small fraction of the vehicular traffic moving between Mobile and New Orleans every day. But it’s a type of connection that Gulf Coast residents have long hoped to restore.
“Driving to and from New Orleans isn’t as fun as it used to be. A train ride is fun,” says Hugh Keating, the mayor of Gulfport. “It’s another piece of the puzzle. The tourism product is very diverse, and the more diversity you have, the more you are able to reach out and bring other markets into your market.”
Gilich recently hosted a family reunion in Biloxi. A cousin was able to fly in from California to New Orleans, take a cab to the Union Passenger Terminal downtown, and catch a train to Biloxi — something that wasn’t possible just two months ago. Gilich himself was driving in to work in his city of Pascagoula-marked vehicle one morning a few weeks ago when he saw a handful of people at the train platform who’d recently disembarked. He pulled over and introduced himself as the mayor. They had just arrived for a day trip and were planning to spend the night in New Orleans. Gilich invited them into his car and drove them downtown to see City Hall, told them where to buy seafood, where to go to the beach, which museums to go to, where the casinos are and where to “party all night.”
“This [service] has enhanced our position to grow,” Gilich says. “You get people here once and they’ll come back.”
