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| Coast Starlight has Amtrak’s largest gain |
| SEATTLE -- We rarely think of Seattle as a passenger rail center, but Amtrak's new ridership numbers might elevate the reputation of the city's King Street Station, the Puget Sound Business Journal reports.
The Amtrak train with the nation's largest ridership gain in fiscal year 2009 was the Coast Starlight, which runs daily between King Street Station and Union Station in Los Angeles. Year-over-year ridership on the Coast Starlight increased 22.3 percent to 432,565, according to Amtrak's new ridership data. Two other Amtrak trains use King Street station. Amtrak's Empire Builder runs daily between Seattle and Chicago. Its year-over-year ridership slipped 7 percent to 515,444. The Cascades service, with multiple runs daily between Vancouver, B.C., and Eugene, Ore., saw its ridership slip 2.7 percent to 740,154. Despite those declines, net ridership on those three Amtrak routes increased 1 percent to 1.68 million because of the Coast Starlight. With numbers like that, the ongoing effort to rejuvenate King Street Station looks like a smart investment. (The preceding article by George Erb was published October 13, 2009, by the Puget Sound Business Journal.) |
| October 14, 2009 |
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