Every decade or so, state transportation bureaucrats dust off their pie-in-the-sky plan to resurrect passenger rail service around Minnesota some day and way. But the Free Press found a funny thing happened when the train lobbyists got to talking about a stop in Mankato.
When an updated Minnesota statewide rail plan is written beginning this month, it won’t include any full-throated call by Mankato city leaders to bring passenger trains to the city. Other area institutions ranging from cities such as Northfield and Albert Lea and colleges such as Gustavus Adolphus and St. Olaf joined a coalition supporting new passenger train service to their towns. Mankato, when asked to do the same, was more ambivalent.
Ambivalent at best.
City Manager Susan Arntz brought the request to the City Council for direction, saying she had no sense of whether passenger rail service is a priority for Mankatoans.
Other than Jenn Melby-Kelley, no council members suggested that it is.
Rather than simply signing off on the state rail plan as usual, Arntz proposed involving the community in the conversation before going further, focusing on practical realities.
“We need to do a lot more engagement about passenger rail as a community,” she said. “We haven’t had the conversations.”
A closer look at the practical implications is also needed, she said, particularly if the service delivered passengers to the city center.
“Where do people get on? Where do people park? So there’s a lot more engagement that needs to be done before the city says, ‘Mankato supports passenger rail on that line.’”
Indeed, the last state rail blueprint called for passenger service between the Twin Cities and Mankato and soon. But it never came close to happening.
It was 15 years ago this month that Dave Christianson, a project manager for the Minnesota Comprehensive Statewide Freight and Passenger Rail Plan, suggested that riders could be climbing aboard a Mankato-to-Twin Cities train within a decade.
Christianson based that upbeat prediction on the continuation of the planning and funding track in place at the time — one that he said would add passenger rail between Minneapolis and Duluth by 2014 and high-speed service from the Twin Cities to Chicago by 2016.
City officials have enough on their plate already without being sidetracked by spending valuable staff time and taxpayer funding on another train to nowhere.
The optimistic forecasts of how soon the funding could be accumulated and when the service could be rolling prompted plenty of well-founded local skepticism. The lack of any progress leaves Arntz confident that Mankato can have further discussions on the topic without being left permanently behind when the updated statewide rail plan is approved this spring.
“Nothing’s been done in the last 15 years,” she said. “I think there would be more time.”