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Passengers wait to board the train at the Amtrak station in Toledo.
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Amtrak plans to cut long-distance trains, including Toledo's, to 3 days per week

The Blade

Amtrak plans to cut long-distance trains, including Toledo's, to 3 days per week

Amtrak plans to cut its trains through Toledo, and many other overnight routes, from their current daily operation to thrice-weekly schedules on Oct. 1 as it continues to grapple with drastically reduced ridership during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Due to the long-term impact of COVID-19 on ridership, Amtrak has made the decision to operate with reduced capacity through FY [Fiscal Year] 2021, Kimberly Wood, an Amtrak spokesman, said Wednesday.

With short-haul routes already having been cut back — and, in a few cases, suspended altogether — “the next adjustment is with our long-distance trains, which we plan to reduce to three days per week” starting Oct. 1, Ms. Wood said.

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All of Amtrak’s service in Ohio is part of its long-distance network. Its Chicago-Washington “Capitol Limited” trains and Chicago-New York/Boston “Lake Shore Limited” trains now run daily, with the former scheduled to stop in Toledo at 11:39 p.m. eastbound and 5:08 a.m. westbound, and the latter at 2:55 a.m. eastbound and 5:55 a.m. westbound.

Its other Ohio train, the Cardinal route through Cincinnati, already runs only three days per week in each direction.

Ms. Wood said schedules for the reduced trains had yet to be determined, so she did not know if the two routes through Toledo would be set up on alternating days to maintain train service at least six days per week. She also could provide no information about how the service cuts would affect Amtrak employees based in Toledo.

“Our goal is to restore daily service on these routes as demand warrants, potentially by the summer of 2021,” Ms. Woods said.

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Griffin Anderson, communications director for U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo), said additional information would be sought about the cuts’ rationale and especially their duration.

“Ridership admittedly is down, but this can’t contribute to the deconstruction of passenger-train service,” Mr. Anderson said Wednesday.

Ken Prendergast, a spokesman for rail-advocacy group All Aboard Ohio, said the service cut will make Ohio’s already meager train offerings “even more irrelevant to travelers and elected officials” while undermining Congressional support for passenger service across the country.

“The decision is based on ignorance by Amtrak's new management and on a short-sighted determination to kill the National Network and isolate hundreds of small towns who lack subsidized air and/or bus services,” Mr. Prendergast said. “It is ignorance because the experience in the U.S. and Canada is that when trains have been reduced to thrice-weekly operation, revenues fall faster than costs.”

Holly Kemmler, a spokesman for the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority, which owns Toledo’s train station, said that agency hopes service will return to normal “as soon as it’s practical” to do so.

Toledo historically has been Amtrak’s busiest Ohio station, although that is in part because passengers transferring between trains and Amtrak connecting buses to and from eastern Michigan are included in its count.

Amtrak’s previous cuts, also announced as temporary responses to the coronavirus, included canceling two of three trains in each direction between the Detroit area and Chicago and suspending the state-supported service between Grand Rapids, Mich., and Chicago. It also dramatically reduced service on its busy Northeast Corridor between Washington and Boston and on other short-haul corridors radiating from Chicago and on the West Coast.

According to several published reports, the only long-distance Amtrak train that will continue to run daily is the Auto Train between Lorton, Va., outside Washington, and Sanford, Fla. Those reports also said Amtrak plans to operate one of its two daily roundtrips between New York and Miami on a four-days schedule so that the net result between those endpoints is daily service. The two pairs of Miami trains follow different routes through the Carolinas.

First Published June 17, 2020, 11:46 p.m.

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