MOBILE, Ala. — A decade after Hurricane Katrina wiped out a long stretch of Amtrak's transcontinental passenger route in the Deep South, the railroad is plotting to bring it back. And it’s attracted a seemingly unlikely group of cheerleaders: red-state Republicans.

For Amtrak, extending the City of New Orleans line from Louisiana to Orlando, Fla., is a chance to demonstrate that its traditionally money-losing long-distance routes deserve Congress' investment. It could also mark a shift in some Republicans’ attitudes toward Amtrak, after decades of GOP leaders in Washington trying to slash the passenger rail’s funding and force it to dump unprofitable routes.


Now local and state Republican leaders along the Gulf Coast are promoting a revived Amtrak route as a tool for commerce and jobs. That argument mirrors the pro-transportation message of President-elect Donald Trump, who is proposing a nationwide $1 trillion infrastructure upgrade that he says would make the nation’s roads, bridges, airports and railroads “second to none.”

Could a new era of an Amtrak-friendly GOP be at hand?

“I think we can make Amtrak work,” said Republican Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker. “We can make it more friendly to the taxpayer, and more efficient, but I think we need Amtrak, and I’ll just say it.”

For Republicans like Wicker, restoring Amtrak’s lost Gulf Coast route would not just recreate a transportation link but would benefit local economies by making it easier for tourists and business travelers to move through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Others argue that the people most likely to move to the region in the next 30 years — retiring baby boomers and tech-savvy millennials — are becoming less reliant on cars and trucks, making it essential for rail to fill the gap.

“You’re going to depopulate rural communities if you can’t connect them to the larger economy,” said John Robert Smith, a former Republican mayor of Meridian, Miss., who used to chair Amtrak’s board and now advocates for transit-oriented development.

Sandy Stimpson, the Republican mayor of Mobile, Ala., said providing money for rail is “part of the federal government’s obligation to address transportation.”

Some national Republicans remain deeply skeptical that investing hundreds of millions of dollars on the Gulf Coast route would be a wise investment, considering that Amtrak has historically failed to turn a profit anywhere outside its D.C.-to-Boston Northeast Corridor. But such sentiments may lose their political sway in Trump’s GOP, even if the president-elect hasn't specifically mentioned Amtrak in his infrastructure pitch.

One harsh Amtrak critic who won’t be around in January, former House Transportation Chairman John Mica, is dubious about prospects for a Gulf Coast revival.

“It’s been a horrible, money-losing route,” said Mica, a Florida Republican who lost his seat on Election Day. He added: “I don’t think it lends itself to daily scheduled service, but I think it has the possibility of some specialty service. It depends on what the market will support, but some of the losses were huge.”

Almost since its inception in 1971, Amtrak has drawn attacks for the money it loses on long-distance routes. Mica has mocked the railroad as a “Soviet-style” operation whose dining cars can’t even sell a hamburger for $9.50 without bleeding red ink.

In August 2005, when Katrina dealt the death blow to Amtrak’s perpetually late New Orleans-to-Orlando route, the entire railroad seemed to teeter on the brink of bankruptcy.

Its fortunes have changed since then — ridership and federal support are holding steady, and its $227 million operating loss in fiscal 2016 is the smallest since Amtrak began. Still, lawmakers skirmish every year over Amtrak's appropriations, causing supporters to consider it a victory just to avoid cuts to its $1.4 billion annual appropriation. That makes the idea of wresting more money from politicians — for a long-distance route, no less — daunting.

So for Amtrak, the Gulf Coast is a crucial test. If it fails here, it would lose an opportunity to take hold in a region whose population is expected to boom, as well as a chance to expand its political appeal.

“I think the more that we show that we can run a safe, financially responsible railroad, the more likely it is that people of both political parties will be supportive of it,” Amtrak board Chairman Anthony Coscia said.

The most immediate task: prove that Gulf Coast service can be cost-effective.

CSX, the private freight carrier that owns most of the track Amtrak would use, said in August that it needs $2 billion in upgrades to sustain passenger service, although sources close to the effort have privately called the figure vastly inflated.

Then, assuming it can get the line running, Amtrak will have to justify its existence almost immediately: The railroad already anticipates it won't be able to cover the nearly $10 million it would cost yearly to run that service plus an accompanying New Orleans-to-Atmore, Ala., route that Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama would have to help subsidize.

The Gulf Coast Working Group, which Congress created in 2015 to study restarting the Amtrak service, is trying to identify funding sources outside the federal government, such as state and local governments and tourist attractions that could benefit from the train service. A report outlining those options is expected by spring 2017.

It's finding support in places like Mobile and Biloxi, Miss., whose leaders call daily passenger train service the logical next step for their visions of rail-, bike- and pedestrian-friendly cities.

Stimpson, the Mobile mayor, wants to use a recently awarded $14.5 million federal grant to pay for bike lanes, crosswalks and other features to help connect a low-income neighborhood to jobs at the city’s aviation manufacturing hub, with any leftover money possibly going to efforts to construct a downtown trail system. The main thoroughfare that flanks the eastern edge of Mobile’s downtown and hugs its river would shrink from six traffic lanes to four, making room for bike lanes and walkways to eliminate what the mayor calls a “psychological barrier” keeping citizens away from the waterfront.

But federal money is still essential, said Stimpson, who’s wary about how much money his city might be asked to kick in to ensure Amtrak trains can stop there.

“I think that it is part of the federal government’s obligation to address transportation. I mean, the states do not have the ability, nor do the local communities have the ability — nor do they have kind of the connectivity or the reach," Stimpson added after giving POLITICO a driving tour of the streets he wants to reimagine.

Besides helping car-free millennials and baby boomers avoid the slog along congested Interstate 10, supporters say, relaunching the Amtrak route would boost tourism by connecting coastal hubs like Bay St. Louis, Miss., and Pensacola, Fla., to Jacksonville on the Atlantic Coast.

Still, some government officials in the South say they need to be convinced that the benefits would justify spending the kind of money Amtrak’s renaissance would require.

One critical question is how many passengers would use the service. Amtrak projects that the revived route would carry 153,900 passengers a year — many times more than the 29,668 travelers its former Gulf Coast service carried in fiscal year 2005 when it was shuttered.

Amtrak’s outlook, on the Gulf Coast and nationally, is tied to the broader debate over how to pay for the nation’s outdated infrastructure, a cause Trump says he supports. The federal government confers billions of dollars in subsidies for highways, bridges and transit — and some Republicans, from Washington to Mississippi, are pushing for passenger rail to get similar treatment.

"I’ve always thought that passenger rail — to include Amtrak — should be part of the mix,” Wicker said. “It’s a major carrier of Americans in not only getting to work, but getting back and forth to all the places that airlines take us.”

Though it may seem at odds with the national GOP’s ideologies, some Republican leaders in the region have long supported Amtrak’s long-distance routes, especially rural lawmakers such as former Sens. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas).

“The only thing we need on this Gulf Coast and in Biloxi — we have the beauty, we have that ocean, we have the most wonderful people on the planet — we just need more people,” Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant said in February after an Amtrak inspection train pulled into the coastal city for the first time in nearly a decade. “We just need more people to come and see this beautiful city.”

Those tourists can “come and stay a week or a month or two,” Bryant said, and “bring their money with them.”

The 34-year-old Southern Rail Commission — staffed by appointees of the governors of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana — has promoted Amtrak’s potential return on social media with the hashtag “#yallaboard.”

But even with bipartisan support, boosters know that a high price tag could derail the momentum. Alabama Republicans in particular, from Stimpson to Rep. Bradley Byrne, aren’t ready to say that restoring Amtrak is crucial for their region’s survival and growth — nor are they willing to write a blank check.

“I don’t think it’s essential,” Byrne said over oysters and gumbo at a Mobile restaurant late last summer. “I think it would be a significant asset if we could do it. Lots of people — young people and not-so-young people — really like the idea of being able to use trains to go east and west, and so I think it would be another good thing for what we’re doing down here.”

But “if essential implies that we’ve just got to do it,” Byrne said, “I don’t feel like we’ve just got to do it.”

Byrne still appears more open to spending money on Amtrak now than he was a year ago, when he voted to cut all its federal operating money. At the time, he expressed support for the government getting out of the railroad business altogether.

Supporters like Bryant note that the public doesn’t blink when lawmakers ask the federal government for billions to build a highway. Federal Railroad Administration chief Sarah Feinberg echoes that point, saying that for communities like those east of New Orleans, “this passenger service is their airport. It’s their new airport, or their new runway. It’s their new freeway.”

Amtrak could ease the federal burden for its long-haul services by seeking private sponsors, such as tourist attractions, universities or sports teams interested in reaching the railroad’s customers.

Those communities and the institutions that anchor them — including casinos, universities and military bases — should collaborate more with their elected leaders and Amtrak to make the case for improved passenger service, said Smith, the former Meridian mayor and Amtrak ex-chairman. And those groups should do more to contribute to the costs of running trains, he added.

Amtrak has tried that before. As it looked to resurrect service between Los Angeles and Las Vegas in the late 1990s, Amtrak secured commitments from casinos to buy blocks of tickets to guarantee sales on a proposed high-speed rail line. But the service never returned, and private companies have since come and gone, trying to bring passenger trains back to an area where travelers either make the four-hour drive along I-15 or take discounted airfares.

But the Gulf Coast has a more diverse string of constituencies that such a route would link — and the region lacks quick, affordable travel options. Indeed, some members of the Gulf Coast Working Group had to change or scuttle their plans to attend an August meeting in Jacksonville because of a computer glitch at Delta Air Lines and a massive rainstorm that stretched along I-10.

At least one Republican senator isn’t shy about calling the railroad’s return a necessity.

“Can we have a successful economy without it? I suppose so,” Wicker said. “But there are going to be millions more people in our area of the country, and restoring passenger rail needs to be part of the mix for moving those people.”