NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — Valley Flyer service between New Haven, Conn., and Greenfield, Mass., will be made permanent, Massachusetts Department of Transportation and Amtrak officials announced Friday.
The extension of New Haven-Springfield service to Greenfield was launched as a two-year pilot program on Aug. 30, 2019 [see “‘Valley Flyer’ shuttles … to being Aug. 30,” Trains News Wire, Aug. 26, 2019]. Service was reduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and revived in full on July 19, 2021. The current schedule offers two weekday round trips and one on Saturdays and Sundays.
“We launched the Valley Flyer with our partners at MassDOT with the expectation it would become permanent, and we are delighted that our joint vision has come to fruition,” Ray Lang, Amtrak vice president, State Supported Services, said in a press release. “We thank our customers for riding with us as their demand for train travel has helped provide numerous benefits to Western Massachusetts communities, residents, and visitors.”
Officials said that while passenger ridership across the Northeast remains below pre-pandemic levels, the Valley Flyer has met projected ridership levels and matched the Northeast Corridor in its level of return to pre-pandemic demand. The service is on track to provide 24,000 trips in fiscal 2023.
As a resident of Franklin County, and as probably the first passenger to ride all the way from Greenfield to New Haven, I don’t have a problem with the train which is mostly funded by the state. But I do have a problem that almost every other service in our 70,000 person county is grossly under funded.
The Valley Flyer equipment is kept over night at Springfield so there are deadhead return moves from Greenfield for trains 494 and 478. I don’t know how often it happens but apparently if there are no passengers bound for Greenfield, these two trains have been known to terminate at Northampton and return to Springfield. I’m guessing there’s probably decent weekend ridership to/from Northampton where Smith College is located.
Lastly, this is an election year so who cares if VF daily passenger count can’t fill a Greyhound bus!
Not much happens in Greenfield or Franklin County, the Bay State’s forgotten outback. (Except of course for those who live there and will take offense to this post.) Proves the fallacy of planning a state-funded train route on the basis of a state’s boundary.
People in Franklin County, those few, feel entitled to a train as much as American taxpayers living anywhere else. Tell that to the people of Columbus, Madison, Green Bay, Fond du Lac, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Nashville, Boise, Butte, Helena, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Cheyenne and so forth.
And that’s not “western MA” either. Amtrak sees this less than skeletal service as part of its sacred NEC so they want it continued. And then Amtrak and MassDOT threw the real western MA a bone in the form of the Berkshire Flyer, a service that we who live here cannot, as a practical matter, use.
Mark Chmura, Mark Belanger, Mark Fidrych, Mark Shapp ….. It’s all Western Mass to me, anything west of Framingham.
My point is, Mark, that the Bay State’s center of population, east to west (half live further east, half live further west) is probably in the area, not even as far out as Framingham, but maybe Newton or Wellesley or Natick. Anywhere west of there (Worcester, Sudbury, Leominster, Blandford, Chester, Rowe, Pittsfield, Charlton, Auburn, Marlborough, Bellingham, Southborough, Lee, Lenox, Leicester, Dalton, Belchertown, Ludlow, Groton, Amherst, Greenfield etc. ) is Western Massachusetts. So the “Valley Flyer” is in Western Massachusetts.
You people can check my math. By my calculation, that’s sixty-five trips a day. On four trains, that’s sixteen riders per train.
I’m all for, 100% for, incremental service improvements (as opposed to CalHSR). But let’s try to get that ridership number a little higher. Or a lot higher.
Actually, it is a tad higher, because there are only two trains per day on the weekends. But that does not disprove your point.