photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Lawrence's Santa Fe train depot at Seventh and New Jersey streets is pictured Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2023.

If you’re catching a ride out of Lawrence’s Santa Fe train depot on the 5:09 a.m. train to Chicago, the odds are high that the doors to the station’s waiting area will be closed and locked.

Lately, it’s a more common sight to instead see people waiting on the platform, even more so when the one long-distance train running through town — the Southwest Chief — is behind schedule on its way from Los Angeles to Chicago. The unstaffed Amtrak station in east Lawrence relies on volunteer caretakers to unlock its doors for waiting passengers, both for the early-morning stop and the 11:49 p.m. return trip, and the morning position is currently vacant.

It’s an issue that’s gone largely under the radar, according to some of the community members who have long cared for the station on their own time. But an Amtrak spokesperson told the Journal-World work is underway to rectify the current caretaker vacancy; Amtrak is responsible for arranging caretakers to open and close the building.

“We are advertising for another caretaker,” Amtrak spokesperson Marc Magliari told the Journal-World. “There needs to be two, and there’s right now only one.”

Interested parties can email GovernmentAffairsCHI@Amtrak.com to learn more, Magliari said.

In the meantime, though, the ability to wait inside the building in the morning is not guaranteed. Magliari didn’t provide a timeline for when Amtrak is hoping to have hired a new morning caretaker.

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It wasn’t long ago that the Santa Fe depot was a more prominent topic in Lawrence meeting rooms. A 10-year effort to rehabilitate the station, which was built in the 1950s, bore fruit in 2019 and the building was rededicated. The station was previously owned by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and was donated — excluding the land underneath — to the City of Lawrence in 2017, paving the way for the roughly $2 million project.

Today, the Lawrence Parks and Recreation Department regularly maintains the depot, including cleaning the space a few times a week and making any necessary repairs reported by station stewards. But although the city owns and maintains the building, it’s not technically responsible for managing Amtrak’s stewards.

Magliari said that it’s not unusual for Amtrak to have stations that are staffed this way, using a combination of volunteers and paid caretakers. Stations in Jefferson City and Kirkwood, Missouri, for example, are staffed entirely by volunteers.

A year after the rehabilitation project in 2020, the Lawrence City Commission was working to find a possible tenant for a roughly 1,500-square-foot area of the building that previously was used as a railway office. At one point, city leaders were interested enough in moving forward with a local marketing firm that had made a proposal to rent the area as office space that they directed city staff to begin negotiating a lease.

But since then, it’s been largely quiet at the depot, beyond the two train stops that take place there each day. That’s because that lease agreement fell through, according to Lawrence Parks and Recreation Director Derek Rogers.

“What happened is we were going down the road of a lease; it was a for-profit company but our city buildings are tax-exempt,” Rogers told the Journal-World last week. “If we had leased to a for-profit (company), that would’ve caused an issue with our tax-exempt status in our facilities.”

That’s why one part of the building has remained vacant for the three and a half years since. But Rogers said the city has hoped all along to find a tenant for the space that would complement the train service, such as a hub for riders on the Lawrence Loop or a coffee shop.

That would still be of interest, Rogers said, but the problem is that most of those complementary uses wouldn’t overlap with the train schedule early in the morning and late at night. Rogers said other possibilities, like office space for city staff or a nonprofit, could be a way to at least keep the building open consistently during business hours each day.

“I think it’s still a possibility,” Rogers said. “Personally, I want to move down there. We did clean up that space in 2020, because there was pipes in the back room and some other things on the floor, so we did clean that up. As an event space, it’s an awkward space to use … During the pandemic and some other things, we just kind of slowed down.”

Both Rogers and Magliari spoke with the Journal-World about whether it’s a safety concern when passengers are left waiting outside the station, especially given that both arrival times are long before or after it’s light outside.

Rogers said he thinks that issue is mitigated if caretakers are present to open the building, and Magliari agreed.

“Some people get dropped off and someone can’t wait for them, so we want very much the station to be open — and safe and sound, and the city’s investment in there protected by having our caretakers come,” Magliari said.

But that staffing challenge is a substantial one, longtime station volunteer Carey Maynard-Moody told the Journal-World this week. Maynard-Moody was the leader of Depot Redux, a group that starting in 2008 advocated for the city to take ownership of the building so repairs could be made. Her group for a time cleaned the depot each month, volunteered as caretakers and orchestrated “on time performances” featuring live musicians as the midnight train arrived at the depot each Friday.

Maynard-Moody said at one time, Amtrak paid caretakers $15 per train met, which she said wasn’t enough to attract more caretakers. Magliari didn’t provide any information about how much Amtrak’s caretaker positions in Lawrence pay, and there is no listing for the vacant morning caretaker position on Amtrak’s website.

“I think it’s a hardship, because of its unpredictability,” Maynard-Moody said. “So if Amtrak is going to seriously take this on and not the city … they’ve got to offer more (compensation) per train met because of the unpredictability. That’s why the volunteers worked so well, because they were not in it for the money. They were just in it for the joy of welcoming people and sending people off.”

Maynard-Moody said her hopes for the Santa Fe depot go beyond just staffing it more reliably — she hopes Lawrence is a proud part of the future of passenger railway travel in the country.

She said she’s also thankful that history has been preserved at the station in the way it has been, and that there are people thinking about how to address the station’s current problems.

“The deeper you get into the weeds, the more history you learn and you can see how it’s related to where we are now and what we can learn from it,” Maynard-Moody said. “… (The station) really was abandoned by its owners — it was an orphan. Our job was to find a forever family for that station, and we found it. The city agreed to be the foster parent. And now, it’s a teenager, and it really needs some control.”