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Politics & Government

Lemieux: Is There a Rail Runner in New Hampshire's Future?

Don't let the speedy roadrunner fool you. New Mexico's train is a turkey.

Dick Lemieux, Neighbor
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Poor New Mexico! They’ve had the wool pulled over their eyes. They’ve dug themselves into a big hole and now they can’t get out.

In July 2006, New Mexico started a new passenger rail service, similar to the one proposed here in New Hampshire. It’s called the Rail Runner Express and it has a colorful roadrunner (the state bird) painted on its sides. The train was hailed by supporters as a progressive step toward taking people out of cars and putting them on the train. Then-Governor Bill Richardson fantasized the Rail Runner would someday go all the way from El Paso to Denver--633 miles.

It turned out to be a ruse. First, the train isn’t fast. Both the name and the cartoon bird painted on its sides give it a sort of subliminal illusion of speed, but cars and buses on I-25 are much faster. That’s partly because the train has to stop every 7-1/2 miles or so, on average, at what one commenter called “political stops”, i. e., small towns and “pueblos” that got train stations in exchange for political support. Average end to end speeds of the longest runs (95 miles, Santa Fe to Belen) and the most popular runs (63 miles, Santa Fe to Albuquerque) are between 35 and 45 mph.

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Second, the train didn’t reduce corridor highway congestion because none existed in the corridor. Even in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, where there is some congestion, not nearly enough people ride the train to make a difference.

Third, not only won’t the train service be extended to El Paso or Denver any time in the foreseeable future, but the New Mexico Legislature would love to dump the train and all its baggage on some unsuspecting buyer. Of course, nobody in their right mind would “buy” it so the state now acknowledges they’re stuck with the train, its debt, and its high operating costs.

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If the Rail Runner Express has brought about any economic development or job growth, it is a well kept secret. The train has developed a reputation for being little more than a taxpayer-supported commuter service for state workers who live in Albuquerque, and commute to Santa Fe (the state Capitol), where housing costs are out of their reach.

One can get a fairly complete picture of the Rail Runner’s history by reading just the headlines of the articles written about it.

New Mexico’s Rail Runner Express: History in Headlines

2006

2007

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

The decisions made by New Mexico leading up to the Rail Runner Express are eerily similarly to those facing NH on the Capitol Corridor today. Rail Runner is similar in concept...similar enough to serve as a lesson: This is what happens when you try to force fit yesterday’s transportation technology into today’s interurban transportation landscape.

By December 2014, when NH’s passenger rail consultant completed a $3.8-million, taxpayer financed, “feasibility study,” approved by the Governor’s Council in 2013, most of the following was readily available in published reports and newspaper articles--and should have been known to the consultant. But the story of the Rail Runner Express was curiously missing in the report that was completed in December 2014.

  • The original cost was supposed to be $122 million but now it’s projected to cost $1.3 billion over 20 years.
  • The annual cost for debt service is $28 million per year.
  • Roughly 10 percent of NMDOT’s road and highway funds are used to pay off the Rail Runner’s yearly debt.
  • The state faces two balloon payments of $112 million each in 2025 and 2026.
  • The state’s Transportation Director has no clue how the state will pay the balloon payments. Costly refinancing looks like the only option.
  • The total debt repayment, including principal and interest, will be nearly $784 million.
  • On one leg, as long as it was free, ridership averaged 4,000 to 4,500 per day but when modest fares went into effect ($2, $3 round trip, half price for kids and seniors), ridership dropped to 1,000.
  • Annual ridership peaked at 1.35 million in 2009 then fell back to 734 thousand in 2013.
  • In 2011, the regional agency that oversees the train was paying an out-of-state contractor $20.6 million annually ($56,400 per day) to operate the trains.
  • The annual operating cost runs around $28.4 million (not to be confused with, but added to, $28-million debt service, above).
  • Annual passenger revenue is $2.8 million.
  • The fare box recovery rate hovers around 10 percent.
  • Passenger fares equate to between 6 and 10 cents per passenger mile, less than one fifth of the out-of-pocket cost of driving.
  • The regular fare between Albuquerque and Santa Fe is $9 one way (again, half for kids and seniors), triple the $3 cost of a faster bus ride.
  • The 62-mile road trip between the Rail Runner stations in Albuquerque and Santa Fe takes 59 minutes by car (Google) and between 1:23 and 1:50 on the Rail Runner (Rail Runner website).
  • There have been 14 fatalities, since 2007, including two bicyclists at the same crossing in separate incidents (but not including 6 cows, owned by the same farmer, in 6 separate incidents).
  • Until 2015, the Rail Runner paid nothing into the state’s insurance fund, while the fund paid out nearly $8 million to settle damage claims.
  • The state is unable to pay the $50 million cost of new government mandated safety technology (called “positive train control”—PTC).
  • In 2015, the Legislature asked the New Mexico DOT to study the feasibility of selling the train to cut the state’s losses. The DOT determined it was not feasible to do so.

It didn’t require any insider knowledge to uncover this dirt on the Rail Runner. It is all available on the Internet and was easily found via Google. But, it was all overlooked by New Hampshire’s rail consultant. Or, maybe it was known but omitted as a courtesy to the NHRTA who, as rail advocates, clearly wouldn’t want any bad news to come out of the study.

It seems unfathomable that a rail transit consultant with a $3.8 million budget, with two years’ worth of time, and charged with telling us whether or not passenger rail is feasible here, never picked up on the history of the Rail Runner.

By the completion of the NH feasibility study, in December of 2014, there had already been 8 years of failure published about the Rail Runner. It was no secret.

Yet the only mention of the Rail Runner in the 3,400-page study told how NM paid for it. ...not how much...just how:

“The Rail Runner...was funded entirely through state bonds backed by state road and highway revenues, including gasoline and diesel fuel taxes and federal highway aid.” (Appendix 3, Page 4)

--as if huge debt and diversion of scarce highway revenue is a model NH should follow!

By including only part of the Rail Runner story, the consultant stacks the deck and potentially exposes taxpayers--ultimately, their clients--to unnecessary risk. URS Corp. (the “Railway People”) is one of the largest rail consultants in the world. It is hard to believe they were ignorant to the history of the Rail Runner, so incompetence can probably be ruled out. That leaves us with the possibility that they knowingly omitted pertinent Rail Runner history.

As taxpayers, we can only speculate as to, first, why they would do such a thing and, second, how the omission could have escaped the review of both the Federal Railroad Administration and the Federal Transit Administration. Maybe their roles as transit and rail advocates got in the way of their roles as stewards of public funds.

We can also speculate as to whether the conclusion of the study would have been different if the consultant had included pertinent information about the Rail Runner...not to mention the seven other commuter rail systems given as models of capital funding. (Appendix 3, Table 3.1, Page 4)

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In an op-ed, published in the Albuquerque Journal, two years ago, Paul J. Gessing, President of the Rio Grande Foundation, wrote,

“If there is a silver lining to all this (anguish over what to do about Rail Runner debt), it is that, hopefully, the next time someone starts selling massively expensive dreams of a transformed transportation network, voters and elected officials will remember that government-led ‘transformations’ come with steep price tags.”

Hear hear, Mr. Gessing!

Will we heed his warnings? Will New Hampshire learn from New Mexico’s mistakes? Or are we doomed to repeat New Mexico’s failure? Will somebody, some day, begin an op-ed with this:

“Poor New Hampshire! Somebody has pulled the wool over their eyes.”?

The Champlain Flyer rail didn’t work in Vermont. The Downeaster is not working in Maine or New Hampshire. The Rail Runner Express is not working in New Mexico. After all those failures, why would anybody believe passenger rail would work in New Hampshire?

Dick Lemieux, P. E., Retired
Concord

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