A story last week in Wyoming’s Cowboy State Daily calls to mind the one transportation mode no longer available on Nebraska’s Great Platte River Road: passenger trains.

U.S. Federal Railroad Administration officials are taking comments on adding 15 routes to Amtrak’s passenger system, one of them touching the Panhandle.

North Platte lost its Union Pacific passenger service May 1, 1971. Amtrak took its place nationally. Sort of.

Nebraska has just one Amtrak route — and it runs 67 miles south of North Platte, stopping at McCook, along a Burlington Northern Santa Fe line.

Nebraska could be worse off, though: Wyoming and South Dakota have none.

The FRA’s plan would remedy that, with three Amtrak trains running in Wyoming alone.

One would link Cheyenne and Denver with Montana. Another would also tie them to Rapid City, using U.P. east from Cheyenne and then BNSF north from Sidney through Alliance and Chadron.

The third would reactivate an old Amtrak route that once carried the old U.P. “City of Los Angeles” train west from Cheyenne through Salt Lake City.

That train went through North Platte back in the day.

So why not us?

It undoubtedly would be tough to return regular passenger service to North Platte, Kearney, Grand Island, Columbus or Fremont, all founded as Union Pacific track-layers moved west.

U.P. was evolving toward a freight-only service model by 1971. Bailey Yard was the prime reason locally. The 1980s onset of Powder River Basin coal trains further reinforced the change.

As Bailey grew, downtown track expansions left little room between the U.P. line and Front Street where once stood North Platte’s historic 1918 depot, home to the World War II Canteen.

Throw in today’s 3-mile-long trains, and one struggles to even imagine where North Platte could put an Amtrak depot if passenger service could be restored.

And yet there’s a reason to at least mull North Platte’s lack of Amtrak service amid nationwide debates over alternative energy and climate change.

Imagine public fossil-fuel access being cut off or strictly rationed — triggered not by either of those issues but by a 1970s-like Middle East oil crisis.

Gasoline-burning cars well might be sidelined. We don’t have widespread all-ethanol U.S. cars.

Would there be gasoline or ethanol for hybrids? And what if all-electric cars remain unaffordable and charging stations few and far between?

Airline service might be grounded or at least dropped for small markets like North Platte. The Platte Valley has intercity bus service, but that, too, might not be a high national priority with a severely restricted fuel supply.

It’s logical to imagine that single Amtrak line through McCook left as west central Nebraska’s sole means of traveling nationally or internationally.

If so, McCook won’t be an hour away from North Platte. Ready for a multiday journey by horse and buggy?

The Cowboy State Daily story says Dan Bilka, leader of the All Aboard Northwest advocacy group, has circulated a map of Amtrak’s current routes with an oblong-shaped figure showing its absence in much of the northern Plains.

Inside it, he wrote: “People live here.”

Yes, we do.

This editorial first appeared in the North Platte Telegraph on February 20, 2024. It was distributed by The Associated Press.