Katrina revives Hammond depot

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Katrina revives Hammond depot

By BOB ANDERSON
Florida parishes bureau
Published: Mar 13, 2006


Advocate file photo
A conductor for the Amtrak train "City of New Orleans" waives to a railfan outside the Hammond depot en route to Chicago.

HAMMOND — The turreted depot in the center of the city has become the little train station that could.

Though only a small portion of the brick building remains devoted to train travel, that tiny waiting room has been packed with passengers and emotion since Hurricane Katrina.

After the storm closed Amtrak’s large station in New Orleans for weeks, the Hammond station temporarily became the southernmost stop and turn-around point for the “City of New Orleans,” the train that runs to and from Chicago daily.

With train traffic dwindling in recent decades, the depot’s waiting room had shrunk to 24 seats as the Chamber of Commerce and the Clerk of Court occupied parts of the building.

Still, it handled hundreds of passengers a day as evacuees caught outgoing trains and workers poured in from the north.

Evacuees walked in with all of the possessions they had stuffed in garbage bags, said Craig Carter, the Amtrak agent who oversees the station.

Emotion is often displayed in train stations, but it spilled before Carter’s eyes as never before in the days after Katrina. People were “crying and hugging and leaving” not knowing if they would have anything to come back to. A few children didn’t want to let go of a neck they wouldn’t hug again for a long time, Carter said.

“To most of the kids, it was a great adventure,” he said. “But the older people understood the ramifications.” Some of them had seen “everything they had worked and sweated over and toiled for destroyed.”

A few passengers paced the small waiting room and asked questions more to kill time than to gain information.

For some older guys, it was the first time they were getting on a train since they left for World War II, Carter said.

At times, men and women sat and cried. Fellow travelers who’d never met them would put their arms around them, Carter said.

Some passengers did more. After a program to provide free fare for evacuees ran out, people in the station pitched in to buy tickets for strangers who had no money, Carter said.

Despite the lines waiting for service, Carter said, he tried to do everything he could to make the situation easier for people who had run into “frustration after frustration” in the preceding days.

“The last thing I wanted to do was cause them any more stress,” he said. “I wanted them to get on the train and think ‘things are getting better now.’ ”

Having to go back to writing tickets by hand when his computer periodically went down didn’t make the process any easier. The temporary absence of air conditioning didn’t help, either.

Despite the 97-degree heat and the packed quarters, tempers stayed cool in the little station and a higher “human instinct” seemed to take over, Carter said.

The area outside the Queen Anne-style station changed, too.

Canadian National workers came in to repair tracks. Train maintenance workers from New Orleans temporarily moved to Hammond to

TRAIN
Service the “City of New Orleans” before it made its return trip to Chicago. Many of their homes had been flooded and they moved into sleeping cars that Amtrak provided on a siding at the Hammond station.

Carter said he would sometimes arrive at the station in the morning and find 30 or 40 people already standing outside. In recent years, that alone would have been a busy day at the Hammond station.

While Hammond served as the southern terminus for the “City of New Orleans”, more than 100 people usually caught the train there each day, according to Amtrak officials. Some days it was a lot more than that.

In addition to the ordinary heavy passenger load, one day 200 out-of-state firefighters piled onto the platform to return home. On the incoming train, 200 replacement firefighters arrived.

Their air packs, axes and other tools filled a special baggage car. The firefighters formed a line like a bucket brigade, passing the equipment from the baggage car to the back of an 18-wheeler, Carter said.

Amtrak added cars as necessary and available to handle the large crowds, Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said.

The track south of Hammond was repaired in October, as was the station in New Orleans. Once again, the “City of New Orleans” reaches its namesake.

The Hammond station and the people of Hammond played a big role in reaching out to their neighbors from the south, Magliari said.

As a new hurricane season approaches, Amtrak officials are discussing with state and local officials what larger role Amtrak can play in future evacuations, Magliari said.

The Hammond station has returned to being a stop along the way as it has traditionally been since it was built in 1912.

Still, far more people are getting on and off the train at Hammond than was the case prior to Katrina, Carter said.

Even as he talked of the upswing in travel on the line, Carter stopped to tell a caller that the train she wanted to book for later in the week was already filled. Together they work out another day when a seat would be available.

A lot of people are still coming to the area to help with the rebuilding, Carter said: “There are a tremendous number of roofers coming in from up north.”

A third-generation railroad employee, Carter said he’s never experienced anything in his 30-years of railroading to match the post-Katrina period.

The emotional events that unfolded in his tiny brick train station was “just a snapshot” of what was going on in south Louisiana, he said.

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Mr. Carter is a friend of mine i was at the Hammond Station the 1st day that the City Of New Orleans came back down to Hammond it was just a real busy day i have never seen so many passengers in the station at 1 time or get on the train.

To this day the ridership out of Hammond LA is higher then before the storm hit NOL.

This story points out many reasons why we need Amtrak and why we need to keep Amtrak ticket agents in the stations.

We need to keep on pushing the Bush Admin not to dissmantle Amtrak which means pulling off Long Distance trains taking Ticket Agents out of the Stations just to save a buck.

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Well i found a video with Carter in it so i have added it to the Save our Trains Mississippi web site it will play when you enter the web site it has train #58 the northbound City Of New Orleans Arriving Hammond LA.

www.saveourtrainsmississippi.com