MOBILE, Alabama — The Super Bowl will be played at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans on Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025. The Fat Tuesday celebrations of Mardi Gras, perhaps the biggest event in both Mobile and the Crescent City, coincidentally take place late next year: March 4.

Now the race is on to start Amtrak Gulf Coast service by then, after the Mobile City Council voted for the service on Tuesday (see “Mobile, Alabama Council Votes for…”, Trains News Wire, August 6, 2024).

“That’s the goal: to get the service up and running for these big events,” Knox Ross, chairman of the Southern Rail Commission, told News Wire, adding: “It would be a great way to show the public that you’re in the middle of the action.”

Whether the planned two daily round trips can be carried out in time will be a challenge. Tuesday’s approval of a three-year lease and operating agreement for the station site with Amtrak “meets some requirements that are important for the further development of this project,” says Ross.

Although Amtrak and CSX have agreed on specifications for the track and platform in Mobile, preparation of the site, now a parking lot, cannot begin until operating and financing agreements are signed. The possible laying of fiber-optic cables could add to the delay.

Likewise, only now can the use of funds from the $178.4 million CRISI grant approved in 2023 be authorized – for track and signal improvements deemed necessary by CSX, Norfolk Southern, the Port of Mobile and Amtrak – be authorized. Then the construction contracts for each of the projects must be finalized and the workforce mobilized.

These parties only agreed under the threat of a settlement with the Surface Transportation Board, which neither party – including Amtrak – wanted to impose because it would set a precedent for the STB’s oversight of their business. Nevertheless, nearly a year of legal wrangling ensued (see “Gulf Coast service awaits Mobile station track, PTC gap closure,” News Wire, Sept. 9, 2023) as the city of Mobile attempted to negotiate contract terms acceptable to Alabama politicians from Gov. Kay Ivey down, who has a proven ideological opposition to any state funding for passenger rail.

The positive influence of CSX management was crucial to the progress of the process, which culminated in a unanimous vote on Tuesday.

“Since Joe Hinrichs took over as CSX’s president, the organization has become a very different place,” Ross says. He also praises Jane Covington, the company’s government affairs officer, who “did everything she could to get us across the finish line.”

As construction begins in the next few months, the Southern Rail Commission plans to pool its limited resources to develop promotional plans with the New Orleans and Mobile congressional offices and the Mississippi cities of Bay Saint Louis, Gulfport, Biloxi and Pascagoula, which are operating on a shoestring budget. “The way this string of Mississippi communities is laid out is just perfect for them,” Ross notes. He says, “Tourism organizations on the Gulf Coast believe that two round-trips will allow people to spend a day or a night there and be home the next morning.”

The SRC’s annual funding from the three states totals $200,000: $70,000 from Louisiana and Mississippi and $60,000 from Alabama. To successfully launch the service, whenever it happens, the organization needs to hire more staff to lead promotional efforts and manage Amtrak’s operational priorities. However, the Federal Railroad Administration has not finalized funding for the $400,000 Interstate Rail Compact grant the agency awarded the SRC in March. The $500,000 Corridor Identification grant the FRA awarded the corridor, meanwhile, can only be used for further planning, not for creating capacity to actually run trains.

The Commission is working with Amtrak to establish the future service as a premier mobility alternative in the region. Train names will be announced once construction is advanced enough to allow a realistic start date to be envisaged.

Still, it is hard to believe that Ross and his colleagues began advocating for meaningful passenger rail on the Gulf Coast more than a decade ago. The first tangible evidence of their efforts was an inspection trip by Amtrak on the Sunset Limited former route from New Orleans to Jacksonville, Florida, on February 18-19, 2016. At the time, there was a plan to supplement a daily train from New Orleans to Florida with a daily round-trip service from New Orleans to Mobile, but station closures and the Port of Mobile’s concerns about congestion torpedoed that idea.

Any consideration of extending the line beyond Mobile is blocked by a change to the lease and operating funding provisions that the City Council approved Tuesday. It allows the city to withdraw its support if Amtrak runs trains east or north of Mobile in the next three years. (Expanding frequencies to more than two round trips a day is also prohibited.) After that, if the city no longer has to provide the funding – regardless of the transportation and commercial benefits that result – a future City Council can revisit the terms of the station lease.

The challenge for SRC and Amtrak, together with the new cooperative company CSX, is now to make the best of the cards they have been dealt.