The federal government announced that they will provide $500,000 in seed money to help kickstart construction of BSPRA North Coast Hiawatha route revitalization between Chicago.
“We just crossed a major hurdle in our work to restore passenger rail service to southern Montana when we learned of our inclusion in the Corridor ID Program,” smiled Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority chair Dave Strohmaier.
Meyer writes, "Ridership of 42,284 annually is derived from an RPA computer model which considers no operational characteristics of the railroad and no local demographics whatsoever, only uniform percentages of county population. The smaller the county, the higher the multiplier percentage. That is why the model projects nearly twice as many riders for the train in Bismarck/Mandan than in Fargo/Moorhead, a metro area with nearly twice the population."