TOPEKA, Kan. — The Kansas Department of Transportation presented a tentative operating schedule for an extension of Amtrak’s Heartland Flyer from Oklahoma City to Newton, Kan. — where it would connect with the Southwest Chief — as part of an online informational meeting Wednesday to seek public comment. The 20-minute presentation included in the meeting is available here via a recording; those viewing it have the option of registering for further updates.
Cory Davis, Kansas DOT’s director of multimodal transportation, says, “We are well underway with a technical analysis.” This is the first step in creating a service development plan that will cover operational and financial analyses, capital investment needs, and an implementation plan. He says the working group that meets monthly includes officials from BNSF Railway, Amtrak, and department officials.
The state is moving ahead with planning, confident that the route will be included in the Federal Railroad Administration’s Corridor ID Program. Inclusion in that list, expected to be announced by the end of November, would give projects preference in competing for Federal-State Partnership planning and construction grants. Even if selected, a timeline of all the necessary steps required to launch the service shows trains are not expected to run until 2029.
The scope of the service development plan only considers extending the Texas and Oklahoma-supported Heartland Flyer to Newton, with Kansas joining the existing partnership. The tentative schedule calls for a 3-hour layover at Newton between a 1:22 a.m. arrival and 4:20 a.m. departure, a window in which both the eastbound and westbound Chicago-Los Angeles Chiefs stop.
The connection to Wichita and Oklahoma City has been served by an Amtrak Thruway bus. A participant asked what would happen if one of the Chief’s was late and arrived after the Flyer’s scheduled departure. John Ireland, the consultant from DB E.C.O. leading the service development team, says the operating plan assumes the train would leave on time. He says Amtrak would likely handle passengers with missed connections as they do now. Currently, that means putting them up in a hotel if the bus can’t make the connection at Oklahoma City [see “Heartland Flyer’s challenging connections …,” Trains News Wire, July 31, 2023].
Davis says the state would have discussions with Amtrak and BNSF about a further extension to Kansas City “if we are awarded the Corridor ID program grant.” For now, consideration of a separate through round trip on a daytime schedule between Fort Worth or Oklahoma City and Kansas City is not being studied. That would likely involve analyzing a passenger train’s impact on BNSF freight traffic and a possible need for additional capacity improvements.
