Kirkwood Station: Leveraging Our Greatest Asset

Update: 04/01/2024:

Last week, the Webster-Kirkwood Times ran a story on cyclists’ frustrations that the bring-your-bike pilot program that Amtrak had advertised all winter hadn’t come to fruition due to low nature of Kirkwood Station’s loading platforms.

I talk about the issue surrounding the platform at length in the article below and expressed my frustration at my inability to get a clear answer as to whether the upcoming renovations will include raising the platform, so while I’m sad to see this fall apart, part of me is glad to see the chickens come home to roost too. My hope is that the article provides some motivation, particularly for Liz Gibbons and Bill Burckhalter, both of whom are quoted in the article, to get the situation sorted out.

Kirkwood’s most significant competitive advantage over our surrounding communities (save for Downtown St. Louis) is the Amtrak station positioned smack in the middle of the densest, most charming part of our city. That Amtrak station is set to receive $5.7 million worth of upgrades beginning next Summer, so I thought now was the right time to take a look at the role Kirkwood Station plays in our community and how the city might get the most return out of its sizable investment.

First we’ll review the coming renovations, then we’ll take a closer look at the station’s service as a means of transportation, and then we’ll finish with some suggestions on how Kirkwood can best leverage it all. Let’s get into it.

Improvements to Kirkwood Station:

According to the city’s website, the following is included in the scope of the project:

• Reproduction of original covered passenger platform connected to the train station on the east side of the station;
• Historically-informed ancillary storage building on the west end of the station;
• Redesign/installation of surrounding outdoor plaza for enhanced/expanded use by passengers and public/private events;
• Expansion and ADA-compliant updating of Men’s and Women’s restrooms;
• Roof replacement and cupola reconstruction;
• Repair and ADA-compliant reconstruction of three exterior doorways;
• Refinish/rehabilitate all original exterior woodwork and windows including striping 6+ layers of paint on baggage room doors;
• Repair, restoration and painting of all windows;
• Repair, restoration and period reproduction of interior walls, ceiling, flooring and lighting;
• Design/installation of modern geothermal HVAC;
• Design/installation of modern fire suppression systems
• New Reconstructed parking lot

Now these are a lot of good necessary tweaks (ADA bathrooms and more efficient HVAC systems are important, especially given the building’s prominence as an events venue and the funding that those events bring into the city), but I’m mostly interested in the upgrades to the facility that will improve its functionality as a transit hub. The expansion of the covered passenger platform and the reconstructed parking lot (if done right) most closely fit this description, but the real functionality improvements might actually be coming from a separate but related project spearheaded by MoDOT and Union Pacific.

Platform Renovations

The potentially even bigger upgrades to the passenger experience, however, might be coming from what is technically a separate MoDOT/Union Pacific-led project running in parallel with the city-led initiative. That effort amounts to an overhaul of the loading platform itself. Council Member Liz Gibbons originally reported back in April that “Amtrak will be putting in a new $1.2M  passenger loading platform at the Kirkwood Train Station.  This will move the platform closer to the track and be on both sides of the tracks, add lighting and be 250′ long.  They are going to be using some of the same stones as on our station.” So far I’ve unfortunately been unable to track down any subsequent confirmation of that scope, but it could be a really big deal, especially if a raised platform is indeed included.

Loading platforms sound boring, I know. But here’s the deal: a raised platform means getting people on/off the train faster, which would get you moving more quickly, which means you get to where you’re going sooner.

The gold standard of platform design is what’s known as level boarding. You build the train to the height of the train deck so that passengers can simply step on or step off. Passengers in wheelchairs or using walkers don’t require any assistance.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the tracks used by Amtrak are owned by freight operators, including those servicing Kirkwood Station, which are owned by Union Pacific. These freight operators are incredibly averse to changes that crowd their tracks out of fear that it will constrain the types of loads they can carry or hinder maintenance and usually deny requests to implement level-boarding. What they typically will allow, however, are very low platforms that at least somewhat narrow the gap, and that’s what I’m hoping is coming to Kirkwood.

Existing Service

Let’s talk a bit about the train service itself. The first thing to know is that trains departing Kirkwood Station end at one of three destinations:

• The two westbound trains (arriving to Kirkwood at 8:39 AM and 3:40 PM) both terminate in Kansas City;
• The 1:47 PM eastbound train terminates in Chicago;
• The 9:10 PM eastbound train terminates just one stop past Kirkwood

Obviously riding the train into Downtown St. Louis at 9:10 PM isn’t super useful, so I’m going to focus on those first three: 8:39 AM to KC, 1:47 PM to Chicago, and then 3:40 PM to KC again. Where do these three trains stop in between Kirkwood and their final destination?

Well KC-bound trains stop in:

• Washington
• Hermann
• Jeff City
• Sedalia
• Warrensburg
• Lee’s Summit
• Independence
• KC

And the Chicago-bound 1:47 PM train stops in:

• St. Louis
• Alton
• Carlinville
• Springfield
• Lincoln
• Bloomington-Normal
• Pontiac
• Dwight
• Joliet
• Summit
• Chicago

So, which of these trips from Kirkwood Station are conceivably useful as compared to driving? Driving is really convenient because it takes you to your exact destination, you get to leave exactly when you want, and you can sing along to the radio without judgment. The biggest advantage to driving, though, is that for most trips in the US, cars do all of this, plus they get you to your destination faster than a train otherwise would.To tackle this last problem, I calculated how long it takes the train to get from Kirkwood Station to each of the destinations above vs. how long does it take to drive the exact same trip (as measured by google maps from Kirkwood Station to station X at the scheduled train departure time).

Now obviously this does nothing to account for the flexibility of cars, plus google maps gives you a range of potential drive times (to account for traffic) and I took the upper end of each of those ranges for this exercise. Still though, as you can see, I did find some trips for which taking the train might actually be quicker than driving! Both the 8:39 AM train and the 3:40 PM train will get you from Kirkwood Station to the Washington, Hermann, Jeff City, Sedalia, and Warrensberg stations quicker than driving would assuming you left at the equivalent time.

That’s not an earth shattering advantage, but I don’t think you should dismiss it either, most especially because while driving has lots of advantages, taking the train has some advantages too. The big one is that it’s someone else’s job to drive the train so you’re free to work or sleep or scroll on twitter; it also means you don’t necessarily have to be sober. More on that in a bit.

System-Wide Improvements

And the service both to and from Kirkwood Station seems to be continually improving, by virtue of both service improvement —which decreases travel times, thus making choosing the train more appealing— and through development around connecting train stations —which should, at least marginally, increase the demand for rail service to Kirkwood (and all the other stations on the route). Here’s a brief outline of some of those improvements.

The Chicago Train Keeps Getting Faster

The Amtrak trip from Kirkwood (and really from St. Louis) keeps getting faster thanks to significant track upgrades in Illinois. As of this Summer, STL-Chicago trains are capable of reaching speeds of up to 110 mph (mostly on the stretch between Alton and Joliet), an upgrade (the previous top speed was 90 mph top) that has shaved as much as 30 minutes off the trip. That travel time will be reduced again if funding gets approved for the Chicago Hub Improvement Project (CHIP), which would allow STL-Chicago trains to utilize Metra’s more direct Rock Island tracks from Joliet into Chicago. The last segment of the route, running from St. Louis to Alton, is still a ways off and will probably require Missouri to pitch in (a tough sell), but this is a really solid start.

Then, on the private side of things, Brightline, a rail operator that’s had some real success in Florida, has named the St. Louis-Chicago routes as one of its finalists for expansion into new markets so we’re left with the prospect that an infusion of money and competition from the private sector could improve things further.

The Missouri Connections Are Getting More Popular

Missouri, as I said above, is more of a laggard in terms of investing in rail, but even in as transit-hostile a state as ours, there’s come good news. On the service-improvement front, MoDOT has pitched the Governor for funding to increase the frequency of the MO River Runner route between KC and St. Louis from its current two daily trains in either direction to three. That seems a little far-fetched to me given how much we’ve struggled to maintain funding for the existing service, but it at least shows someone in Jeff City is thinking in the right direction. The real good news, however, has come in the form of development along the route that should lead to increased demand.

Much like Kirkwood itself has, downtown Washington, MO continues to add significant housing directly adjacent to its station, mostly at the hands of a company called Front Street Development, which has developed 31 units of infill housing and commercial space directly adjacent to the station, but also includes a 600-seat concert venue/arcade combo that should be completed by late 2024/early 2025. This sort of infill could pay dividends for Kirkwood thanks to the fact that train travel times outperforms driving between the two cities by as much as 28 minutes. If your final destination in both Kirkwood and Washington are within walking distance of the stations themselves, that starts to get really appealing.

Then, there’s wine county. The Hoffmann family is in the midst of a massive spending spree in the region that they hope will turn it into a tourist mecca. That investment —spread across 700 acres primarily located in Augusta and Washington, but with significant synergies for Hermann (the first Amtrak stop after Washington) as well— has encountered some road-blocks since it was first announced, but it still seems on track to significantly bolster demand for transit to the area, both for workers and tourists alike. I suspect that a sizable chunk of that increase could be met by train service to Hermann and Washington given that a day trip to the vineyards is not nearly as much fun when you have to worry about being sober for the drive home. These communities also already have pretty solid bus/trolley shuttles to circulate people to the various surrounding vineyards one you arrive further lending to the trip’s appeal.

Finally, the Katy Trail currently intersects with the KC-Kirkwood/STL Amtrak line at three spots: Lee’s Summit near KC (although a gap in the trail remains between Lee’s Summit and the Eastern portion of the trail which begins in Pleasant Hill), Jeff City, and Sedalia. This makes for an already appealing out-and-back journey that utilizes the train for one leg of the trip, and clearly Amtrak sees the potential here too. Beginning March 1, 2024 and running through the end of September, Amtrak is launching pilot program in which each River Runner train will include a car that can accommodate up to 20 bikes (hopefully Alpine Shop can get some programming stood up around this development). Cyclist demand should further increase as the Rock Island extension of this trail system gets filled in and ultimately intersects with the Katy at just a couple of towns over from Sedalia at Windsor, MO, and eventually, Washington.

How Kirkwood Can Leverage

So that’s a lot of good news! The question now shifts to how Kirkwood can harness it to our own benefit. And here I think the recommendations are fairly straightforward and well-worn at this point, but to summarize:

• Kirkwood should issue a Request for Proposals to develop a boutique hotel on one of the surface parking lots in Downtown to facilitate travelers who might be enticed to take the train into Kirkwood for a weekend sans-car (who would add tax revenue while adding minimal traffic/demand for parking, the best of both worlds)
• We should build good, covered bike storage at Kirkwood Station as part of the renovations
• We should also make sure that improving the Metro #49 bus stop —including a shelter (depending on how far the new train platform roof extends, it could do double duty here), digital schedule and a raised loading platform (if ever there was a stop that this would be helpful at its this one given how much easier it would make boarding and off boarding with suitcases)— are part of the transit renovation plans for those who don’t want to or can’t leave their car parked overnight
• And finally, the Downtown Kirkwood SBD should market the shit out of train trips, and maybe even organize a “Kirkwood Takes the Train to Wine Country” trip, which would piggy back nicely with the recent publicity wine country has been getting in the Webster-Kirkwood Times

These are all immensely achievable objectives that would improve tax revenue, increase amenities for citizens, reduce carbon emissions, and further develop the sense of place and identity we’ve always derived from being a train town. Time to issue the all-aboard.