Amtrak’s Mardi Gras train returns, joyfully, 20 years after Katrina

MOBILE, Ala. — There it was again, after all these years: an Amtrak passenger train, its red and blue cars gleaming in the moonlight as it idled at a platform in Mobile, Alabama.

An eager crowd had gathered before dawn Monday, ready to board the train for its inaugural trip on the restored Gulf Coast line, newly christened the Mardi Gras Service, between Mobile and New Orleans. And many more travelers were waiting at stations along the way.

Two decades after Hurricane Katrina decimated entire coastal communities and wiped out passenger rail service along the Gulf Coast, the return of Amtrak this week — with two trains daily in each direction — sent a jolt of excitement down the coast.

“It’s almost like it’s one more step toward the healing,” said Charlotte Welco, 60, who boarded in New Orleans with her mother in the afternoon, bound for Biloxi, Mississippi, near her home in Ocean Springs. “This is just something else to get us excited.”

The trains also stop in the Mississippi cities of Pascagoula, Gulfport and Bay Saint Louis during a journey that takes about four hours in all. At a peak speed of about 79 mph, it is not particularly fast, compared with some of its international counterparts.

But that didn’t seem to matter as the 6:30 a.m. train out of Mobile prepared to trundle through the shipyards, mossy woods and marshlands that line the coastal route.

“I’ve just always wanted to ride Amtrak,” said Pat Stancliff, 71, as she waited to board her first train ever. Jittery, she had arrived at the station in Mobile two hours early. “It’s the luxury of seeing things I don’t get to see.”

Passenger rail was once central to life in the South, its role immortalized in Delta blues and twanging country musings. But east of New Orleans, it faded as the landscape became sliced up by highways and dominated by cars. Amtrak stopped a short-lived service dedicated to the Gulf Coast in 1997; a longer route passed through New Orleans on the way to Florida before Katrina struck in August 2005.

After the storm destroyed major bridges and damaged more than 100 miles of track east of New Orleans, CSX, the freight rail company, reopened full service on the line in about five months. But the return of passenger rail was stalled by bureaucratic and political disputes, including resistance from freight rail, and by a lack of funding.

Federal dollars from the 2021 infrastructure law that was passed under President Joe Biden, coupled with hard-fought local negotiations, finally opened the way for service to restart. While some federal funding is in place for at least three years, and local and state governments have committed to providing money, the success of the line will hinge on its reliability and on how many people choose to ride it.

“It really does require ongoing support, in terms of ridership and development support,” said Amtrak President Roger Harris, speaking at a celebratory luncheon in Mobile on Saturday. Most of Amtrak’s investments in recent years have focused on repairing and improving existing infrastructure, in part because starting new services would require state and local governments to provide support.

Harris was among a few dozen dignitaries — politicians, lobbyists, royalty from Carnival krewes (as Mardi Gras parade groups are known) — who were the very first passengers on Saturday. Monday was the first day that members of the public could ride, and a total of more than 200 people boarded the early morning trains in Mobile and New Orleans. Each of the trains would make a return trip in the late afternoon.

“Everyone’s waiting for my input,” said Jasmine Hudson, 32, off to celebrate her birthday and second wedding anniversary in New Orleans before reporting back to friends about the rail trip. Her husband, Terrance, 29, a truck driver, said he was curious about what an otherwise familiar journey would look like from the train.

With coach tickets as low as $15 each way, it felt less expensive than gasoline and parking would be — especially in New Orleans.

“It’s nice to travel slowly as a family,” Amanda Haney, 32, said with her 7-month-old boy Matthew nestled against her chest. Since her husband would not be driving, they could take turns holding their son and keep their attention on each other and on the sights.

Cheers and applause rang out shortly after 6:30 a.m. as the train shuddered and began to move out of Mobile. “They’ve got a priest out there,” one man called out, tracing the sign of the cross as he peered out the coach window at a group of onlookers who had assembled to see the train off.

As they settled in, travelers exchanged stories of long-gone relatives who worked on the railroad, or the cinders from a steam locomotive that had once caught in their hair. Sights like shipyards, a lone fisherman in a bay, and the casinos of Biloxi — now, after Katrina, built on land rather than floating on the water — triggered memories.

For a few grandparents who had not ridden trains since they were children, the trip inspired visions of taking their families on rail journeys. Other passengers fantasized about the possibilities. Maybe now they would ride the rails beyond the South — to Chicago, perhaps, or even out west.

People could be seen waving to the train from their backyards, from the middle of empty streets, from golf carts parked at stations. In Gulfport, there was a Santa Claus in shorts.

“I’m going to ride it,” announced David Wilson, 47, who briefly stopped applying a fresh coat of paint to the Pascagoula depot this week to record video of the train passing through. Then he chided a colleague who was helping to restore the old wood flooring so a new brewery could move into the building: “You missed the train.”

Never mind that it can be faster to drive through the three states on Interstate 10, or that on Monday morning, a tractor-trailer got stuck on the tracks and delayed the New Orleans-bound train by nearly an hour.

“It’s worth every minute,” said James Allen, the conductor on the inaugural passenger run. “It’s just beautiful out there — I really enjoy looking out the window.”

Outside, there were swings in a backyard; a church with white siding; the remnants of an encampment; aboveground tombs in a graveyard.

“The backyards of America is what we’re seeing,” said Joan Sanders, 75, lingering in the warmth of a vestibule between cars.

As the train got closer to New Orleans, it slowed long enough for passengers to glimpse dragonflies dancing over tufts of marshland grass. An egret stood motionless, its long neck curved against its wings, as fish bubbled in the water nearby.

Late Monday afternoon, as passengers assembled at the New Orleans station for the return trip, they swapped stories of what they had done and seen while wandering around the city. Many of them had taken refuge from the sweltering heat at museums or the aquarium.

Beignets had been eaten, as had stuffed shrimp, grilled alligator and bowls of crawfish étouffée.

“I feel like I’m on vacation,” Welco said on the afternoon eastbound train. She sipped from a plastic cup of chardonnay as her mother marveled at the final rays of sun glittering off the water near Bay St. Louis.

The landscape soon faded into a blur of evening darkness, broken now and then by the neon lights of the Paradise Pier Ferris wheel in Biloxi, the strings of lights on cottages near Gulfport, the flash of car headlights before the Pascagoula station stop. Some passengers were already planning their next ride.

“Let’s go tomorrow,” one woman called out as the train pulled back into Mobile.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.