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SJ Leads Amtrak Performance Gains

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The exponential growth of tourism in and around the community of St. Joseph is also positively impacting Amtrak’s Pere Marquette passenger rail service into and out of the St. Joseph Amtrak Depot below the bluff alongside Silver Beach Pizza. In fact, passenger counts in both May and June at St. Joe were up by more than 31-percent, far outstripping any other stop along the route.

The Pere Marquette line runs from Grand Rapids to Chicago every morning and makes a return trip in the evening with stops in Holland, Bangor and St. Joseph-Benton Harbor before hitting Union Station in the Windy City.

Overall ridership aboard the train increased by 5.6-percent in May and 6.1-percent in June. Activity at the St. Joseph depot, however, soared by 31.8-percent in May and 33-percent in June, dramatically surpassing other stops on the line. Conversely, Holland’s passenger counts fell in May, down 1.5-percent and more than tripled that drop in June when the station registered a 4.8-percent loss in passenger traffic.

Bangor traffic was up 19-percent in May, but fell sharply to a gain of just 1.8-percent in June. Grand Rapids traffic counts were up by 2.1-percent in May and 7.7-percent in June, while Chicago traffic fell 4.2-percent in May and nearly tripled that fall off to an 11.5-percent drop in June.

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Ticket revenue for the full Pere Marquette line increased by 4.3-percent in May and jumped up by 11.5-percent in June. Even with those gains however, the nine month performance has been impacted by earlier traffic dips and the line is down by 10.2-percent (7,182 fewer riders) for the nine months of the current fiscal year, while revenue is down some 8.8-percent to $2.04-million.

In May, a total of 1,037 passengers stepped onto or off the train at St. Joe, and that number increased to 1,261 in June.

Michigan’s two other main passenger rail routes both lost traffic in June, with the Blue Water corridor down by 4-percent and the Wolverine line falling off by 20.1-percent. For the current fiscal year, the Blue Water is the only line showing a positive rider increase, up by 1.2-percent or 1,573 passengers. So far in the current fiscal year, the Wolverine has lost 23,600 passengers, but is still the largest line in operation with more than 319,300 passengers thus far.

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