Amtrak’s Mardi Gras Ready For Gulf Coast Runs

By Jim Mathews / President & CEO

Beginning on August 18th, you’ll be able to travel along the U.S. Gulf Coast between New Orleans and Mobile, Ala., for as little as $15, on board the long-awaited Amtrak Mardi Gras.

That’s this week’s “press release” announcement from Amtrak, and it’s true enough. But those 32 humble words only scratch the surface. The launch of this service will unlock as much as $282.6 million in economic growth each year in Mississippi and $389.2 million annually in Alabama by connecting people to where they work, live, study, play, and pray, easily, safely, and affordably. All for a price tag of just a few million dollars.

The Mardi Gras is going to transform the Gulf Coast.

We’ve all waited 20 years to get to this point – in my view, probably 18 or 19 years too long – and the list of people and entities to thank is lengthy and distinguished. There were dozens of local elected and appointed officials, rail commissioners, business-community leaders, and grassroots advocates, and each stepped in and played their parts at crucial moments when all looked lost. People like Sandy Stimpson, Mobile’s mayor, or Knox Ross of the Southern Rail Commission, or former Meridian, MS, Mayor (and Amtrak Chair) John Robert Smith. Or Bryan Fuenmayor, a Mobile resident and grassroots advocate who galvanized local support in the past two years to get this project past its final political hurdle.

As has often been noted, politics is the long, slow boring of hard boards. It’s worth remembering that the very first trip I took when I became Rail Passengers’ CEO 11 years ago was to visit with Republican leaders in Mississippi. Fifteen days after I began my new job, I was in Meridian, Gulfport, and Biloxi, where we talked about the need to restore this service. When you’ve invested that much time and effort into securing a win, it's worth celebrating — particularly when so many citizen advocates have volunteered years of their time to the cause.

But if the process for launching each new train service is as lengthy and convoluted as it was with the Gulf Coast service restoration, we’ll never build the passenger rail network that this country so desperately needs.

That’s why the Rail Passengers Association is working to ensure that the bill that replaces the Investment in Infrastructure and Jobs Act (IIJA) when it expires next year includes reforms to speed up project delivery, while providing more Federal support – financial or otherwise – for these new or restored interstate routes.

It’s just plain unreasonable to expect 20 different local governments across a corridor to march in lockstep over a 15-year period. If any one of those local towns can effectively veto a new route at any point across the life of its development, these projects are destined to fail. Amtrak’s new Borealis between Minneapolis/St. Paul and Chicago blew the doors off every single ridership projection and has been a huge success by any measure – but that project, too, began life 20 years earlier, and took 10 years of active work across various state bureaucracies to coax into life.

Ten years for the Borealis. Two decades, and countless millions of dollars in white-shoe litigation, for the Mardi Gras. And meanwhile, I can start an airline in as little as six months with the same amount of money I might need to buy a single new U.S.-manufactured railcar.

The absurdity of it all is clear when you look at how much commerce these relatively small investments will generate. With a hat-tip to my dear friend Paul Nelson, our Rail Passengers Council member from Mississippi, here’s a micro-example of how this works:

“Suppose you get on in Biloxi or Gulfport and ride over to Bay St. Louis on the morning train. Go to the Mardi Gras museum in the restored depot, have a cup of coffee in the thriving little storefronts that have taken off in anticipation of the new Mardi Gras service across the street from depot and community park,” he says. “Then walk down to the waterfront and have a great seafood meal in one of the funky dive bars or fine dining, overlooking the Bay. Stay at a boutique hotel along the waterfront. In the morning grab a cup of coffee and pastry, spend the day shopping at the art galleries and boutique stores…relax and have an early supper next to the depot and catch the evening train home.”

That’s just one trip. Coffee, dinner, maybe some gift-buying, an overnight in a hotel. Every one of those transactions supports a workforce, a supply-chain of business-to-business vendors, and the sales tax revenues of the community. And this, multiplied by many thousands of riders, is how the Mardi Gras will be an economic engine in the communities it serves.

It would have been an even bigger, more powerful, engine if the political price to be paid in Mobile didn’t involve capping the frequencies at two trains per day in each direction – a requirement set by Mobile City Councilman Joel Daves, who had long opposed the train.

But this week is a time to celebrate what’s been accomplished, and to look ahead to what more might be in store. Each of the five newly served destinations, Bay St. Louis, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Pascagoula, Mississippi, and the endpoint at Mobile, Ala., will start with temporary platforms. The communities can decide later how to remake their stations, their “front doors,” to welcome new visitors and make the most of this investment.

You could go to Pascagoula for the new brewery, but there’s also lots of attractions including a couple of parks, an amphitheater with a nice outdoor venue, the oldest building in Mississippi.

I’m a sucker for minor-league baseball, and Biloxi is home to the Milwaukee Brewers’ Double-A affiliate, the Shuckers (who, by the way, are crushing it this year. 46 wins and 29 losses). You could go try your luck at the casino there, too.

How about the Mississippi Aquarium in Gulfport? Or if you’re one of the 20,000 new-ish U.S. Air Force Airmen learning your trade each year at Gulfport’s Keesler Air Force Base, maybe you’ll want to take advantage of a precious couple of days’ leave to visit New Orleans. (The 81st Training Wing is the schoolhouse for Air Force electronics technicians, weather forecasters, air traffic controllers, personnel folks, and even medical staff.)

WiFi, no middle seat, local and regional food and beverage in the café car, no traffic, no drunk drivers, and fares as low as $15. Was it worth 20 years’ of campaigning? You bet! Y’all aboard!