OP-ED
Opinion Editorials state the views solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Community Journal.
by Patricia Grabow
Let's say you've been frustrated with your car lately.
Let's make it serious. You own an old Yugo or some similar heap. I won't say 80s Fiesta, because those at least ran, and my son still dreams of fixing up his someday. But this Yugo is frustrating: it breaks down, it's nearly impossible to get parts, and with hard work it still wouldn't be taken very seriously even at the downtown car show.
Then you remember, in a bit of amazing amnesia, that you have a nice F-150 you tarped over in the garage for some reason or another, but with a little work it could be back to being a great workhorse. And suddenly out of the blue someone mentions theirs, and you think, why am I still driving my rattletrap when with a little basic fixing I could be back in a nice pickup?
Now think city economies instead of cars, and you kind of have what happened to me at the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority (BSPRA) annual conference in Missoula last year, with flickerings of the same idea at prior events going way back. I'm excited to say that very soon they'll actually be hosting this year's event here in Livingston—for details see the banner on the railing at Main and Park.
To preface this story however, I have to mention the head of the BSPRA organization, Dave Strohmaier. Dave and I go back years. Livingston started an organization called Montanans for Rail Passenger Service. Seven hundred seventy-one local people, to be exact, signed the MRPA petition to work to bring rail passenger service back to southern Montana. Reviving the Park line isn't viable, but we wanted rail passenger service back in our original historic rail gateway city that once served our great first national park. That originally ended in '79, and Amtrak consolidated to the north line.
With time, Dave and tons of people including those from Livingston and I worked hard to have the state legislature pass HJ34, sponsored by Andrea Olsen from House District 100, to investigate the prospect of reviving rail passenger service; writing, lobbying, and petitioning, Livingston played a big part when our bill passed both the state house and senate. The problem of course was that after all of our hard work, after the legislative session, the transportation committee fell asleep and did not act further.
I was a little steamed.
Dave was undaunted. He had worked with us, but did not give up. He went back to Missoula, ran for county commissioner, and went to work again. It turns out that counties have a certain legal authority with respect to such service, and he and others started the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority (BSPRA), garnering many resolutions of support.
So there I am back at the BSPRA's conference last year, when one of the speakers, George Bailey, from St. Regis, Montana talked about what was happening in his community. I've mentioned this before, but St. Regis is 72 miles out of Missoula on I-90 on your way to Coeur d'Alene. It used to be a lumber town when I went to school in Libby. Then the tree industry died, and they relied on tourism to at least partly fill in for their more marginal livelihood there. When the 2021 $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) was enacted, George and St. Regis geared up, in great creativity, to make hydrogen fuel. It's not a naturally existing resource, but it can be created from water with electricity like solar or wind. They're still working on large scale application, so it's really a form of storage for other energy but minus the lithium, it still burns like a fuel. And even Toyota has reportedly dropped its EV program now in favor of hydrogen development.
So after George's presentation, Dave Strohmaier turned to the about 200 attendees at the BSPRA conference and says, "What we need is somewhere to build the trains."
That was my “Hey, wait, I still have that F-150 in the garage!" moment.
Think of Livingston’s current post-railroad-pullout economy as the Yugo, and the pickup as representing the kind of economy we could have if we got stubborn enough to keep scheming and really get our railroad shops back to work. The tarp over the F-150 is like the constraints of the carcinogenic plume cleanup, most of which has since been fully mitigated.
I raised my hand at the event and mentioned our mostly sidelined Livingston shops to the delegation. As many know, the Northern Pacific originally constructed them as the largest maintenance facility on the interior line, partly for our central location and partly because of the wear the Rockies put on steamers back in the day. A decade or two after the BNSF pulled out, the Talgo company bought them primarily in anticipation of greater demand and funding for high-speed rail. That never materialized, not for any shortfall of the shops, but because that market and funding fizzled.
I had the rare chance to tour them when I was on the City Commission, and I was very impressed with what they were capable of.
Until then, like most Livingstonians, they weren't really on my radar. I live two blocks from the trains downtown, but like all of us
I hear the whistles and almost don't think about them. But they really are the music of history. They occupy a significant fraction of the downtown footprint, depending on how you measure it, yet we seldom think about them. Unless you put up a drone for perspective, we almost never pay attention to the twenty plus acres of land east of the shops as well, whose potential I discussed recently but essentially, they are sitting there with the potential of being a game changer for our town.
After I mentioned this to the BSPRA conference audience, including their potential in connection with hydrogen engines, I was approached by guests from two large US train manufacturers in attendance who were interested in knowing more.
As well they should have been. I was chatting before the August Art Walk with Park County commissioner, Bryan Wells, and he mentioned he used to work in the Livingston shops as a pipefitter in the late 70s and early 80s. He said that those shops were amazingly built and literally could do nearly anything.
They could paint trains. They could build trains.
They could take an engine into the repair area and lift out the entire motor with their massive lifts, service and repair it, and reinstall it back in the train.
Bryan said that when he was there, Livingston still had at least 600 people working in its shop. He loved the job. It was well paying, the shops were bustling, and the benefits were good.
In case you hadn't noticed, trains are famously fuel-efficent at transporting cargo, and the demand for them on the lines seems to continually increase. Predicting the future with certainty is for people braver than me, but in the last four decades, this remarkable facility hasn't gone anywhere. Under the current administration the IIJA remains frozen, but with a revived interest in domestic industry, that could thaw.
Constantly evolving market factors will ultimately determine a lot of that, both on hydrogen and on rail passenger service. But it should be interesting to hear the latest at the BSRPA conference when it visits here.
In the meantime, our F-150 has its tarp off and just a faint glimmer of its former shine. With a little work and spit and persistence, it could yet and still beat the pants off the Yugo!