Downeaster waves off down year

PORTLAND – As Amtrak’s Downeaster passenger train service marks its two-year anniversary, rail officials say they hope to boost ridership, revenues and the speed of the train.

Rail officials said ridership and revenues are down from the service’s first year, which benefited from what they call a “bubble of curiosity.”

Ridership figures are now settling down, and officials say they have a better sense of how people are using the train after a 36-year absence. Before the Downeaster began service Dec. 15, 2001, the last passenger train from Portland to Boston ceased operation in 1965.

“This thing was just a dream for so long,” said Patricia Douglas, the marketing and development director for the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority. “Now that it’s finally here, and we have a couple years worth of data, we can look at what we’ve done and see what makes sense.”

Although ridership was down for the year, the train’s on-time record of more than 96 percent is one of the best in the Amtrak system. The customer satisfaction rate – 95 percent in surveys – is among the best in the nation.

And commuters make up a bigger proportion of the overall ridership. The commuter sector is important because they ride year-round and on weekdays, when the train has more empty seats.

On Wednesday, to celebrate the train’s second anniversary, the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority plans to throw a party for commuters, who will ride in their own car and be feted with free food.

Officials said commuters that first year composed 6.4 percent of total ridership. This year, commuters made up 11.5 percent of the riders.

The person with the longest commute is Stephen Jordan, who commutes to Boston every day from his home in Sidney, north of Augusta.

He commutes 1,700 miles a week, but all that traveling is bearable because 1,140 of those miles are in the comfort of the Downeaster, where he says he can relax and complete paperwork he used to do at home when he lived in Boston.

But instead of living in a cramped Boston condo, he now has a roomy house with a 15-acre spread in Maine.