Carey Maynard-Moody is no Dr. Emmett Brown, but she does share the confidence of the movie character who realized his time-traveling dreams with the help of a plutonium-powered flux capacitor.

While Maynard-Moody’s transportation vision isn’t quite so ambitious, she’s comfortable knowing that hers actually is quite realistic, now that Amtrak and the Kansas Department of Transportation are studying the feasibility of expanding passenger-rail service through Lawrence.

“It’s heartening that the state of Kansas has seen fit to fund it,” said Maynard-Moody, a Lawrence resident and co-chair of Depot Redux, a group that wants the city to acquire and restore the Burlington Northern Santa Fe depot at Seventh and New Jersey streets. “I believe, in my heart of hearts, it’s because of the public outcry. It’s huge. We want choices.

“It’s time to get back to the future.”

The study, expected to last into May or June, is designed to crunch the numbers necessary for deciding whether to pursue state financing for passenger rail service from the Kansas City area south to Oklahoma City, where it could join the daily Heartland Flyer connection to Fort Worth, Texas.

The study will provide “purely a technical and financial analysis” regarding what resources would be necessary both to get the service up and running from the Kansas city area south into Oklahoma, and to keep the system going into the future.

In Kansas, communities being studied for stops along the route are Topeka, Lawrence, Emporia, Strong City, Newton, Wichita and Winfield/Arkansas City.

“This is a great time to look into it,” said Ron Kaufman, KDOT’s chief of public involvement. “We think it has a lot of potential. It’s certainly worth studying it and finding out what it would take to do it.”

Fourteen states, including Oklahoma and Texas, already provide state-supported rail service, something Kansas has yet to venture into. Providing state money for Amtrak operations would require approval from two-thirds of both the Kansas House and Kansas Senate, Kaufman said.

KDOT already has heard plenty of interest from the public regarding passenger rail, Kaufman said. Now it’s a matter of having some detailed information available as the state compiles its next program for transportation financing, a program whose prospects are uncertain as the state grapples with budget shortfalls.

“We have to start the process,” Kaufman said. “We have to have numbers. It’s the first step.”

KDOT is spending $200,000 for the study.

Maynard-Moody is looking forward to a day when Lawrence residents and other Kansans once again have the opportunity to board a daytime train at the depot in east Lawrence. Along with the depot restoration efforts, she also is a board member for the Northern Flyer Alliance, a group seeking to extend Amtrak’s Heartland Flyer north into Kansas.

“Passenger rail is an easy sell,” she said. “There’s a collective, historic memory of what it was like when it was working. People really do want to get back to the future.”