By JO LEE FERGUSON
MARSHALL — Amtrak’s Texas Eagle train has improved its on-time performance more than any of the other long-distance trains Amtrak operates.

Amtrak officials were in Marshall on Saturday to meet with members of the Texas Eagle Marketing and Performance Organization, a group of volunteers who champion the Texas Eagle along its route between Chicago and San Antonio. The train connects to the Sunset Limited train in San Antonio to provide service to Los Angeles.

About 30 people attended the meeting.

«The most improved of all the long-distance trains is the Texas Eagle,» said Marc Magliari, Amtrak’s media relations manager.

Barbara Bruce, senior scheduling officer for Amtrak, showed the group charts illustrating the Texas Eagle’s improvement in being on-time. The company has set a 70 percent on-time performance goal for the train, she said. The charts she provided showed that the train met that goal during three months of the 2004 fiscal year that ended last month.

While the train’s on-time performance still isn’t where Amtrak wants it to be, she said it did show improvements.

«This year we’re still well above where we’ve been in the past two years,» Bruce said.

On-time performance in the 2003 fiscal year never hit the 70 percent goal. The train hit that mark once in 2002, according to the charts she provided.

Magliari said the Texas Eagle’s average on-time performance in the budget year that just ended was 62.7 percent, up 24 percent from the previous year. That on-time performance ranks fourth among Amtrak’s 14 long distance trains. On average, the on-time performance rate of all 14 trains was 42.2 percent in the 2004 budget year.

Magliari credited Texas Eagle’s performance to Amtrak and Union Pacific. The Texas Eagle runs on track owned almost exclusively by Union Pacific, and Union Pacific controls dispatching for Texas Eagle.

Also, he said the number of riders on the Texas Eagle increased between the 2004 and 2003 budget year. In the first 11 months of the 2004 budget year, from October 2003 to August 2004, the Texas Eagle saw 218,915 passengers. September figures were not available. The Texas Eagle had 198,517 riders during that same time period between 2002 and 2003.

Bruce also told the group Saturday that Amtrak has decided to launch an idea suggested by a TEMPO member at a previous meeting — the first Spanish language wallet card. Wallet cards detail a train’s schedule and are distributed at the depots and on the trains.

Bruce said Fort Worth TEMPO member Matt Fels had suggested that Amtrak create a Spanish-language wallet card for the Texas Eagle. The Spanish language cards should be out at the end of this month, she said.

«We’d definitely look at other routes where we see a market for it,» Bruce said.

State Rep. Tommy Merritt, R-Longview, also spoke to the group Saturday, encouraging members to organize in support of establishing high-speed rail authorities for rural areas of Texas, including the Texas-Louisiana border region.

«The idea is that there are federal dollars that would flow,» Merritt said, explaining that only a governmental entity would have standing in Washington and Austin.

He proposed a trans Texas corridor following Interstate 20, between Dallas-Fort Worth and Bossier City/Shreveport, pointing to a model the Texas Department of Transportation developed for the corridor that would include passenger and expanded freight rail.