Amtrak has ended the Trails & Rails program on the Empire Builder/Wikitravel

It’s early morning in Whitefish, Montana, and the sun slowly climbs over the Rocky Mountains to the east and begins to warm the crisp night air at the beautifully restored Amtrak passenger depot and touches on the gleaming eastbound Empire Builder that has paused there. 

While some people depart the train, many others—tourists, backpacking explorers, Amish families, local Montanans with distant appointments—climb aboard, and many settle in the lounge car, which provides beautiful views out large windows on both sides of the train. As the Builder slowly begins to move eastward, the volunteer National Park Service interpretive guides in the lounge car begin their presentation, which will cover the geography, geology, history, and biological diversity of this marvelous part of our nation.

For approximately five hours, the guides provide commentary as the train climbs and crests the mountains at Marias Pass bordering Glacier National Park, and then makes a long, gradual descent through the Blackfeet Indian Reservation to the northern plains, where they will depart at Havre, Montana. Later that afternoon, the guides will board the westbound Empire Builder in Havre and talk these new passengers from the east through the same countryside, until the setting sun finds the train passing through Whitefish once more on its way to the Pacific Northwest. In both directions, the guides will be constantly engaged with interested, questioning learners and showered with compliments and many thanks as the miles roll by. 

At least, that’s the way it used to be. 

After the summer season in 2017, Amtrak leadership made the unilateral decision to cancel its support for the NPS guide service aboard the Empire Builder and all other long-distance trains throughout the nation. The service, named the Trails & Rails Program, had been a partnership begun in 2000 between Amtrak and the National Park Service to educate travelers regarding the heritage and natural resources of a specific region while traveling by rail. In Montana, the Trails & Rails volunteers on the Empire Builder encouraged passengers to visit local communities and explore the state and national parks and forests along the train’s route. Because the Empire Builder makes three stops in each direction at Glacier National Park, guides were able to promote both the park to Amtrak passengers, and Amtrak to park visitors. During the 2017 season, the 26 Trails & Rails volunteers staffing the Empire Builder delivered some 1,200 hours of presentations to many thousands of passengers, a service donated to Amtrak and its customers valued at $36,000 (based on volunteer time rated at $30 per hour).

National Park Service Trails & Rails guide Jim Eagan talks with international travelers in the lounge car/ Friends of Trails & Rails

None of that mattered, however, to an Amtrak administrative staff using questionable financial analysis methods to focus only on making transcontinental trains profitable. In a slow death of one thousand cuts, the flowers disappeared in the dining car, current newspapers were no longer outside sleeper room doors each morning, wine-tasting events evaporated, many important staff and crew positions were cut, and Trails & Rails support was withdrawn. This significantly diminished the guide program nationally and completely eliminated guide coverage on the Empire Builder between Seattle and Havre.

For a moment, let’s step back in history. 

When President Thomas Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, he anticipated creating, as he himself called it, “an empire for liberty.”  And in 1804, he sent the Lewis and Clark expedition on its epic “voyage of discovery” to explore and catalog his vast purchase, which revealed a stunning and amazing land to the west, ready for settlement. Thus, in the 30 years following the Civil War, the transcontinental railroads snaked across the plains, conquered the Rocky Mountains and the desert basins beyond them, and reached the Pacific Coast. James J. Hill’s Great Northern was not finished until 1893—the last of the Western trains to be completed in the 19th century while running through harsh and challenging country often near the border with Canada—but it found the lowest and best pass over the Continental Divide, and thanks to Hill’s financial management, was built without the largess of federal land grants.

Hill’s vision was to settle the land along his tracks by recruiting wheat and cattle farmers from Europe and then to transport their bounty to market. At Hill’s insistence, his railroad was surveyed and constructed with great care, and it was always profitable from its beginnings, even as it stretched for thousands of miles across unsettled land and created many small towns along the way. Because of his success, Hill became known as “the Empire Builder,” and his memory is preserved today in the name of Amtrak’s premier northern long-distance train. This is one of many stories told by the Trails & Rails guides as the miles aboard glide by—one that the guides know by heart and tell with a passion for connecting this current generation with the people and values of those who came before us and who built this great nation in their time.

Travel, of course, is more than history. Most Americans today are well aware of the many scenic wonders of the West, and the transcontinental railroads have brought generations to explore and admire our national parks. The Santa Fe railroad took travelers to the Grand Canyon; the Union Pacific, to Utah’s Bryce Canyon and Zion; and the Northern Pacific became the route to Yellowstone’s geysers. 

Hill’s Great Northern skirted Glacier National Park’s southern boundary, and the railroad was instrumental in helping the park develop through the construction of magnificent lodges and chalets. And the interest continues unabated today: the stunning glaciers, mountains, and wildlife of Glacier National Park, which was the nation's 10th most-visited national park in 2018, had nearly three million visitors last year, with many arriving and leaving by train at one of three stops: West Glacier, Essex, and East Glacier. The vast human majority that is urban Americana today can board the Empire Builder and within two days be peacefully transported to this national treasure--one of the most beautiful natural landscapes in the continent. It has been this way for over one hundred years.

Guides help passengers understand the benefits of a natural forest fire/ Friends of Trails & Rails

Many modern politicians consider trains an anachronism from another age—an historical remnant which no longer resonates with these times. People, they say, are in a hurry, and need to get from one coast to the other within a matter of hours, flying at five hundred miles an hour far above the earth at 35,000 feet.  At that altitude, however, a rolling field of wheat is the size of a small postage stamp, and entire mountain ranges become mere wrinkles far below. 

The Trails & Rails guides know that you need to be close to the land to become part of it, to emotionally sense it, and they strive to help passengers make that connection. With other modes of transportation, there is a remote disattachment and indifference to our history and our countryside as we rush through the miles that go flying by—often at great heights.  Riding the Empire Builder at 50 miles an hour across 2,000 miles of vast wheat-filled plains, massive mountain ranges, broad rivers, and the many towns beside the tracks is to touch the face of America and to sense its beauty and its history.

To eliminate our transcontinental trains—especially the Empire Builder—would be a foolish and short-sighted mistake of major consequence. As more Americans rediscover what passenger trains have to offer, ridership is up and summer reservations especially are frequently hard to come by. 

The small rural towns across the West, often initially created by the railroads to provide water and fuel for their steam engines, remain heavily dependent on passenger service. And as in days of old, trains like the Empire Builder still provide a direct connection to the majesty of our national parks. 

But each year there is a fight for funding in Congress, and Amtrak is consistently left without sufficient funds to effectively maintain or modernize its equipment. The current administration continues to propose deep cuts to national rail service; Republicans in particular demand that Amtrak cover its expenses, even though the government has long subsidized airports and airlines, funded roads throughout the country, and even constructed the Interstate Highway System across the nation. The lack of a reliable and adequate federal subsidy has been Amtrak’s greatest challenge since its creation in 1971. To touch our history, to view the beauty of our natural heritage, to preserve who we are and from where we have come, we must adequately fund Amtrak and save our long-distance trains across America: it should seem like a patriotic obligation to do so.

Let’s assume for a moment that the Empire Builder is secure with a sound funding source, and that you are aboard in Montana, westbound to Seattle, looking in amazement at a view the likes of which you have never seen before. You wonder what those hills in the distance are called—aren’t they somewhere close to the Canadian border? It’s windy here with little rain; how can farmers grow crops in this climate? Who founded, named, and built the small town we just passed by? There are oil wells and turbine wind farms in the distance; how did those come to be in such a remote area? 

And as you pass by Glacier National Park, you wish that you knew more about its history, its geology, its wildlife—and how you can return and spend time there. You eventually go to sleep, only to see a stunning view at dawn as the Empire Builder descends in Washington to the Columbia River Gorge and its massive basalt cliffs. How did all of this come about? In the Cascade Mountains, you pass through the longest tunnel in the United States, and would like to know how it could have possibly been constructed without modern instruments and tools. Finally, as the train skirts the shores of Puget Sound near Seattle, you would like to know how the Sound was formed, the names of the birds and sea creatures visible on the beaches below, and how the area came to be settled.

The Trails & Rails interpretive guides are there to answer your questions, and hundreds of others from fellow passengers. They are well trained, knowledgeable, and delighted to interact with you and share their information and enthusiasm. As William J. Lewis has said, “Interpretation requires an interpreter, an audience, and something to interpret.” The audience is you and the hundreds of others aboard the Empire Builder. The “something to interpret” is rolling by outside your window—mile after mile of ever-changing scenery. But what has been missing since 2017 is the interpreters—the guides from the National Park Service. Even if the trains such as the Empire Builder are saved, the value of each passenger’s journey aboard remains greatly lessened because questions go unanswered and what is seen is unexplained.

Every interpretive guide who has been on the Builder can tell stories of passengers moved to tears at hearing the plight of the Plains Indians in American history, or gasping in amazement as he/she explains the beauty of alpenglow in the last minutes before sunset along the western face of the snow-covered Rocky Mountains. Hearing the story of the bison causes many to shake their heads, while others listen in rapt attention as the guide tells of the great journey of Lewis and Clark and how close the passengers are to one of their campsites near Cut Bank Creek. The guides explain avalanche chutes in narrow valleys, and then parents begin to point them out to their children. The guides discuss climate change and its repercussions, and indicate stressed and dying forests and other signs of that change directly outside the train windows. Mile after mile, the interpretation and involvement happily go on, and when darkness falls passengers applaud and cheer and thank those from the National Park Service for the value-added benefit they have provided.

This is as it should be. This is what it must be again. If we are to save the Western trains, and if we are to bring back interpretive guides to them, then contacting those who can make those decisions is imperative. Contact your congressman. Do the same with your state legislator. Write a letter to Amtrak, too. If we are to save the transcontinental Empire Builder and its brethren, and if we are to reinstate National Park Service interpretive guides aboard those trains, it is up to you. Let’s preserve and protect this modern remnant of American history, and reinstate those aboard who can help us sense the very soul of our nation.

National Park Service guide Barbara Bond-Howard helps passengers plan hiking trips in Glacier National Park/ Friends of Trails & Rails

To contact Amtrak:

             Amtrak Corporate Office Headquarters

            50 Massachusetts Avenue

            Washington, D.C.

            202-906-3000

            www.amtrak.com

To contact your federal and state elected officials:

 www.usa.gov/elected-officials

The Friends of Trails & Rails

Bob Bjorge

Barbara Bond-Howard

Chris Collison

Craig Wilkie

Leigh Wilson