Editor’s Note: Beverly Stoddart takes an indepth look into why New Hampshire doesn’t embrace commuter rail.
“To Dream the Impossible Dream / To fight the unbeatable foe”
“The Impossible Dream (The Quest)” composed by Mitch Leigh, with lyrics written by Joe Darion.
WINDHAM, NH: Peter Griffin loves community service. He has 50 years of volunteer experience in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts. He just stepped down as town moderator in Windham after 30 years. Within all these years of volunteering, he was the past president of the New Hampshire Railroad Revitalization Association started in 1992 with the goal to “upgrade and restore the rail connections for both freight and passenger rail between New Hampshire and Massachusetts.” The association was abandoned after the prospect of $5 million of federal money being provided to study the feasibility of extending rail into New Hampshire and there wasn’t a perceived need any more for the association. (Please note this interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Known as the Capital Corridor Project, it, “Would extend the existing MBTA passenger rail service approximately 30 miles northward from Lowell, MA to Nashua and Manchester, NH using approximately 9 miles of existing MBTA railway and approximately 21 miles of existing Pan Am Railways’ New Hampshire.”
Among the strategies presented to substantiate the reason for the study included: Improve connectivity to Boston, diversify the primarily single-mode reliance on roadways, support mobility options that match emerging demographic trends, and maintain the strategic infrastructure investments.
Peter Griffin, as far back as the early 1990s foresaw the need for railroad access in New Hampshire. He had seen what was going on in the other states around the Granite State.
Amtrak’s Downeaster. Photo by Charlie Howard.
“Maine was developing what is now the hugely successful Downeaster service. Vermont was moving forward on extending rail service back to Vermont, and eventually negotiating with Canada to restore service to Montreal. New Hampshire was not doing anything which left the only accessibility to New Hampshire was by automobile, buses, or trucks on roads.”
However, factions in the state were lining up against the idea of a study for rail and three members of the five-member Executive Council voted against continuing with the project when an extension was being requested.
Griffin said, “They didn’t even get to complete the total project. By project, I mean the total report. The DOT commission had gone to the Executive Council to have an extension on the completion date, and the Executive Council said we are going to kill it. And that was a three to two vote with David Wheeler, Ted Gatsas, and Joe Kenney voting against it.”
Executive Councilor Joseph D. Kenney, Republican, was on the council at the time of the commuter rail survey that voted to discontinue the study. We spoke about the reason why and he explained that the estimate to create a new track system from Nashua and Manchester would be in the “hundreds of millions of dollars.” He added that Nashua and Manchester would “ have to build a station and they would also operate and pay for it,” and the state would have to subsidize, “$12 million to that track system.” He also continued, “Commuter rail is a nice thing for people who’d like to have it but it’s not something we need based on the cost.” He added that the balance of the money from the survey was put back into the highway fund.
As I dove into the subject of commuter rail, the thought occurred to me, here we are again: The Island of New Hampshire. The State of New Hampshire has, so far, decided not to participate in legalized recreational cannabis like the other states that surround us. Yet, we led the way in gambling in 1963 by becoming the first state to have a legal, government-operated lottery. In 2018 the Supreme Court opened up legal sports betting and we jumped on that bandwagon. But commuter trains are off-limits. Something that will help the state, yes being incredibly expensive initially, and need to be subsidized but the Downeaster has proven, as they say, if you build it, they will come. Our surrounding neighbors are doubling down on rail. Maine will see new modern Amtrak Airo trains in 2026, Vermont is considering an Amtrak expansion, and Massachusetts is looking to add a “strategic asset.”
As recently as August, Massachusetts was looking at options for commuter rail. An article titled, New Mass. study weighs rail options along state’s Northern Tier by Sam Doran, State House News, August 14, 2024, read: “The rail line stretching along the northern tier of Massachusetts to Greenfield and North Adams is a “strategic asset,” state transportation officials said in a new report this week, but the benefits of restoring passenger service in the region — with a price tag of up to $2.96 billion — “may not offset the capital costs.”
Still, Peter Griffin is not alone in supporting the commuter rail in the state. The New Hampshire Business for Rail Expansion with a mission that is “committed to expanding passenger rail from Boston to southern New Hampshire and growing, diversifying, and strengthening New Hampshire’s economy.” Their website states “74% of New Hampshire residents support passenger rail.” There are over 100 businesses signed onto the site that are in support of passenger rail expansion. Among them are Brady Sullivan Properties, Bank of New England, Manchester-Boston Regional Airport, Stonyfield Farm, Inc., and the University of New Hampshire.
E.J. Powers, a partner at Montagne Powers, a “strategic communication firm,” a spokesman for the organization, said, “We’ve tried to take politics out of the equation. [We’ve] done our best and highlight the benefits of rail and overwhelming public support. A majority of individuals from every demographic, age, and gender supported rail expansion. We want to continue advocacy in moving rail expansion forward to come before our elected officials. Is the investment worth the benefits? It’s over 5,600 permanent jobs, $750 million in real estate development, and 3,600 new residential developments. Residents and policymakers need to make that decision.”
“I was just speaking recently to a longtime colleague of mine on this,” said Griffin, “He is Representative Charlie St. Clair, (D-Belknap,) and he wants to see rail restored. He’s probably one of the biggest businessmen in the state. He oversees the motorcycle week every year, and he’s been a huge advocate.”
St. Clair, who was on the ballot in the Democratic primary on September 10 and won with 32% of the vote, is a member of the House Transportation Committee. He owns the Laconia Antique Center in downtown Laconia. When I asked him about how we could get commuter rail in New Hampshire, he said, “With a different governor and the right people down in Concord, we would.” He added, “It would be so good for business and employers, potentially [have] more people to hire.” “The kicker,” he said, “most of the money is out there from federal funding. Apparently, we don’t want it to come to us.”
“The question has to be asked,” says Peter Griffin, “Why has it been blocked all the way along on all levels of government, the Governor doesn’t support it, the Executive Council doesn’t support it, the Republican legislature doesn’t support it. Some people have said, well, Peter, you’re a conspiracy theorist. The Koch brothers have spent millions of dollars on killing public transportation in the country. The organization they use to implement that is Americans for Prosperity. Americans for Prosperity has a very powerful lobbying group in New Hampshire, and they are always asked about their opinion on all sorts of legislation.”
To learn more about the workings of the legislature and the Americans for Prosperity lobbying group, I turned to an expert on covering the NH State House for decades, Garry Rayno. Garry’s column, Distant Dome, runs on InDepthNH.org.
Garry has memories of riding a train in his youth. “I remember as a young kid riding them. We went from Concord to Boston on the rail. There was a line that used to run up through Andover and through Grafton up to the Upper Valley.”
We dived into the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity Group, which was founded in 2004 and based in Virginia. According to their website, their mission: Creating Change. It reads, “AFP’s grassroots, policy, government affairs, communications, political and education and training capabilities make us the best organization to change the policy landscape in America.”
Garry noted, the AFP, “is a 501(c)(4). It means that you don’t have to say who’s behind it, but it’s funded by the Koch Foundation, and they’re very active on a lot of issues, but they have been very active, particularly in opposing the commuter rail here through lobbying the legislature. They spend a lot of money on political campaigns in New Hampshire. And part of that is they want to find people who also agree with them in terms of the need for commuter rail from Boston to Manchester or Concord or Nashua.”
Garry added, “It’s a very complex problem in a lot of ways because you have the issue of [the] fossil fuel industry opposing it because obviously, they want to keep selling oil and natural gas, and particularly oil and diesel fuel and things like that. But you also have a fairly large state investment and federal investment in the bus service between places in New Hampshire and Boston.”
“You have two large companies, C&J Bus on the Seacoast and Concord Coach Lines when they got together and formed Boston Express because part of the I-93 expansion includes ways of reducing the amount of traffic. This is one way that they proposed to doing and having more buses between New Hampshire and Boston. The actual amount of state investment in this is well into the tens of millions of dollars, but they certainly were subsidized.”
“And then you have the problem with the rails, and who owns the rails, and for years, it used to be Guilford Transportation Industries, which is basically Tim Mellon, who has received some notoriety in the last few months because of his support for the Trump campaign. And it became Pan Am because they bought out Pan Am Airlines, and then they used that as a moniker for their holdings for the railroads. They did control them because they sold it, but they did control it from Nashua up to Concord.”
“We had a history of kind of trimming service and letting the infrastructure sort of deteriorate to some extent, and when people were working on trying to make clean rail work, part of that would have to be upgrading the line between Nashua and Concord or Manchester. Pan Am refused, for the most part, to do anything about it, and said, if you want to do it, state, you can pay for it. The state said, basically, we’re going to pay for it, then we want some sort of ownership for our control. They weren’t particularly willing to negotiate about that.”
“I think about four or five, maybe a little bit longer, six years ago, [Pan Am] sold to CSX, which is another huge rail holding company that owns an awful lot of rails across the country. All of those things have come together and have made it a difficult haul for Concord.”
Always along the way, my thoughts were that the only way to accomplish rail would cost close to a billion dollars. Garry said the last estimate was almost $800 million.
He continued, “Then build the infrastructure they need, which is rail stations and fixing up the rail line, and there’s been federal money dangling out there for quite a while, but, I mean, it’s got to be matched with some state or local money, and that’s where the rub comes. You talk about $800 million when your entire capital budget for the State of New Hampshire for the two-year biennium is about $135 million.”
“The state’s tax structure is kind of dependent on other people funding state government, like liquor taxes and tobacco taxes and things like that. And also second homes. We have depended on tourists, meals taxes, and so on for most of our revenue, instead of actually, something like a sales tax or income tax, which most states have. We have property taxes and tourism taxes, or taxes that out-of-state people will pay. It’s always been that way. We kind of hope other people take care of our problems in a lot of ways.”
I then asked Garry if he ever saw the State of New Hampshire have any other alternative to getting in a car, getting on a bus, and having the majority of goods transported on something other than a truck.
“It’s going to take a pretty significant investment to upgrade the infrastructure [of rail] if you’re going to really increase the traffic. However, I mean, you have to look over to the Seacoast, where the Downeaster has actually been fairly successful. That was pooh-poohed when it started. But the longer it’s been around, the better it’s done. But the other side of it is we have seen a change in work habits too, which is that people don’t necessarily have to go to Boston to work with Massachusetts. Stay at home and work remotely.”
Daniel Kool, Portland Press Herald’s article on August 6, is titled, “Downeaster reports record-setting ridership, revenue for 2024 fiscal year.” He wrote, “The line, which carries Amtrak passengers from Brunswick to Boston had nearly 600,000 riders between July 2023 and this June – a 4% increase over the mark set in 2019.” Reuters transportation reporter, David Shepardson, spoke with Scott Simon on the NPR Weekend Edition Saturday on August 3, and said, “[Amtrak ridership] looks very strong. Through the first nine months of the budget year – through the end of June – Amtrak had about 24.1 million riders. That’s up 18% over the prior year.”
Even with a positive trend toward the limited amount of rail we have in New Hampshire, Garry Rayno added, “They all say the same thing, which is, it would be nice, but you probably need a subsidy of someplace around $15 to $20 million a year if you’re going to want to run it from Concord to Lowell. And that’s the sort of thing that stops a lot of people.”
When you have someone like the Koch brothers who are funneling probably the amount of money against commuter rail that we would need to make it possible, they deem to stop it from happening. They’re very well-funded. All The President’s Men gave us the catchphrase to “follow the money.” In this case, the money leads back to two brothers, one has passed, who decided New Hampshire should not invest in rail. And so, one man in Wichita, Kansas determines our path forward by pouring money into our state legislature.
To get a local reaction to the question of the Americans for Prosperity position on New Hampshire commuter rail expansion, I reached out to Republican John Stephen’s campaign for Executive Council. He will be facing Democrat Jim O’Connell in the District 4 Executive Council race in November. I spoke to an aide of Mr. Stephen explaining the question and asking what is their position and have not heard back from them. Meanwhile, a simple Google search of “Koch brothers public transit,” brought up a list of headlines. Here’s a sample: The New York Times, How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects, Grist.org, The Koch brothers hate public transit. And Mass Transit, How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country.
Garry added, “Americans for Prosperity, they have organizations across the country. So, it’s not like it’s just New Hampshire. I do think that they sort of targeted New Hampshire because of its sort of Libertarian bent over the years. It may have a Libertarian bent, but it’s never been quite as conservative as I think they would like to make it. They’ve been fairly successful. I mean, we have the Free State Project, which they’ve largely funded. They’re setting the agenda right now in the House. They’re about a quarter of the members of the House right now.” The New Hampshire House of Representatives has 400 members.
Garry continued, “Americans for Prosperity is a nonprofit education organization. What they are is a lobbying group essentially for the Koch Foundation. The Free Staters is a separate project that intended to bring all these like-minded people to a small state and be able to sort of take it over. They’re succeeding in Concord. I’m not sure they’re succeeding in the general state.”
With organizations like Americans for Prosperity and their benefactors the Koch Foundation, plus the prohibitive costs, and the state’s anathema of a broad-based tax, getting commuter rail in New Hampshire would be an uphill battle.
Brad Cook in the NH Business Review wrote in 2018, “New Hampshire has such an antiquated tax system with the property tax, that there is no money to meet needs in communities that have to be funded through the state.”
Is commuter rail in New Hampshire just an impossible dream? Who knows? I was born in the 1950s and had the life experience of seeing so many amazing and unimaginable changes in our world. When microwaves were being introduced, my husband was dead set against having one declaring they would cause cancer. In just the 1950s, 60s, and 70s we got computers, bar codes, and birth control pills. We had to wait until 2007 to get the first iPhone which has become an extension to my hand. NASA only had incredibly qualified military men go to space. Now, someone like billionaire Jared Isaacman, not an astronaut but the first non-professional spacewalker, could spend $200 million to take a trip on SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission and walk in space, albeit a short one, along with SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis, who was also the first woman to walk in space and fly so high.
Maybe we won’t need rail in the future, perhaps we will finally have a version of life that the 1962 cartoon The Jetsons promised. They were right about dog treadmills, video calls, smartwatches, robot assistants (think Roomba), flat-screen TVs, and yes, flying cars that many companies are developing. They are known as eVTOLs, electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. Now, all we have to do is wait.
Beverly Stoddart is an award-winning writer, author, and speaker. She is on the Board of Trustees of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project and serves on the board of the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism. She is the author of Stories from the Rolodex, mini-memoirs of journalists from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
