LOUISIANA — When Amtrak’s Mardi Gras Service hit the rails in August 2025, restoring passenger rail service along the Mississippi Gulf Coast for the first time since Hurricane Katrina, everyone was excited, but no one knew what to expect. Now, seven months later, people are pleasantly surprised.
“It’s exceeded all expectations,” said Amtrak Senior Public Relations Manager Marc Magliari.
“We’re obviously very pleased,” Knox Ross, Chairman of the Southern Rail Commission said. “We felt like it would do very well, but it was hard to estimate what exactly the ridership would be, especially for Amtrak, because it’s been since Katrina that there’s been a train there.”
The Mardi Gras Service has departures twice a day with stops in New Orleans, Bay Saint Louis, MS, Gulfport, MS, Biloxi, MS, Pascagoula, MS, and Mobile, AL. The full route, from New Orleans to Mobile, takes less than four hours.
Steady ridership
Since its August 2025 launch, tens of thousands of passengers have hopped on board the Mardi Gras Service.
According to a Southern Rail Commission report from the beginning of March, as of Jan. 31, 2026, nearly 70,500 passengers have traveled on the new line, with ticket fares averaging $34 per person. That report also notes that Amtrak’s Customer Satisfaction Index survey shows 94.1% of passengers were extremely satisfied with their overall experience.
“If you give people a better choice than I-10 and U.S. 90, you run it a couple times a day with decent fares on a lovely route with great crews, you attract customers, and that’s what we’ve done here,” Magliari said.
“We’ve been working on this for so long, and we have been building up the communities and talking to the press and talking and talking and talking about it,” Ross said. “I think that people were just excited. They said, ‘Okay, this is going to be great.'”
While railway leaders expected the new line to see a lot of passengers initially, they’ve been pleasantly surprised that ridership has remained consistently strong.
“I think the surprising thing to all of us was that we felt like we would have an initial surge of riders and then we would have to work to build the ridership. That just hasn’t been the case at all,” Ross said. “It hasn’t dropped off at any point. We’re still running 400 passengers a day on average, a little more than that.”
“It’s not the volume of people riding that’s been surprising. There aren’t any real soft days of the week,” Magliari said. “On a lot of routes like this, you’d typically find fewer people riding on a Tuesday or Wednesday than you’d find on a Thursday or Friday. But the fact is, about every day of the week’s pretty strong on this run.”
Tourism boost
Cities along the route promoted the service leading up to its launch, and leaders are already seeing it pay off. “People are going there and spending the day and spending the night,” Ross said. “All of the work that Visit Mobile did and what they’ve done in Mobile to promote the service paid off.”
“And then the Mississippi stops, we’re just thrilled about it, because this is bringing people to Mississippi that just wouldn’t come there otherwise,” Ross said. “A lot of these people are new tourists that are going there and seeing what the Mississippi Coast has to offer for the first time, and they like it because they’re coming back.”
“The Mississippi Coast is kind of unique in that, for this particular service, all of the stops are very close to the downtown area, or the attractions that are in these cities,” Ross continued. He says that stores, restaurants, and historic depots along the Mississippi coast are seeing more customers and revenue.
Leaders are also excited to see what happens with ridership during cruise season. “They’ve got two new cruise ships coming in. How that will impact the number of people riding the train to catch a cruise remains to be seen,” Ross said.
“They’re already going to New Orleans. We’re excited about the number of people coming in and out in New Orleans every day, because the Union Passenger Terminal is right by the Superdome, and that’s an area of the central business district in New Orleans that really needs the most help,” Ross said. “It needs an injection of people. This is the injection of people. And so there are hotels being built and things being done in that part of town, and this gives that even more energy.”
Football, festivals, and Mardi Gras
Saints Sundays saw an increase in ridership, and Amtrak worked to make sure it could accommodate. “We tried to add a car, whenever we could,” Magliari said. “We’re very constrained in fleet, but we certainly do try to add capacity when it’s called for. And it certainly was called for during the Saints season.”
“We added extra cars for the Saints weekends, which were well patronized. It was very good,” Ross echoed.
Saints Sundays weren’t the only time the Mardi Gras Service has seen more passengers. “We also saw very high ridership, some of our highest load factors, for an event called ‘Cruising the Coast,’ which is a gigantic car show all over the Mississippi coast for a week,” Ross continued. “People figured out that the train was the easiest way to get from one city to another, because all of the classic cars congests everything. We found that that was a terrific ridership boost for the train.”
The line also saw an uptick in passengers during its namesake season, Mardi Gras. “There’s a lot of things to do every day of the week on that route at both of the end points,” Magliari said. “Both Mobile and New Orleans claim to have started Mardi Gras. And there’s plenty of things to do in coastal Mississippi between. We expected strong ridership. We weren’t expecting this strong a ridership.”
“We added one car for Mardi Gras, which did very well. We had good ridership during Mardi Gras,” Ross said.
Ross is excited to see how the new line does as festival season really ramps up across the South. “We’re starting festival season soon in New Orleans, with Jazz Fest and other big festivals,” he said. “This would be perfect for people to come into the city for the day or overnight, because they don’t have to park their car. They don’t have to worry about traffic. During the summer, all the coast cities have tremendous festivals and weekend deals, and the train is going to be a terrific way to experience all of those.”
Expansion plans
The quick success of the Mardi Gras Service already has leaders looking into the future and talking about expanding the line, maybe even into Baton Rouge.
Magliari says Amtrak, LaDOT, and other state departments of transportation have been talking about expansion plans. “We all think that taking the train off to Baton Rouge, starting it there in the morning perhaps, and ending it there at night would give us good business too,” he said. “Because if you’ve driven I-10 between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, you know that it can be pretty miserable.”
Ross said LaDOT is studying a Baton Rouge-New Orleans route now. “It’s something that DOTD is in charge of,” he said. “We’re supporting that effort as they ask us to and they study it. They’re almost finished, I think, with the first part of that.”
“The big issue on that route is what’s called the Bonnet Carré Spillway, which is for flood control,” he explained. “The CPKC Railroad has a bridge over the spillway that dates back to the 1920s or 1930s, and they have a 10 mile an hour limit on it. So for effective service to start, the biggest issue is what do you do about the bridge? So the LaDOTD has applied for some funding to figure that out.”
“This is something everybody wants to do,” Ross continued. “I think the best way to characterize the Baton Rouge-New Orleans right now is that there’s a process in place, and we’re moving through it. Whether that means they’re going to start anytime soon, I can’t say that. But it’s something we’re working on.”
Download the Unfiltered with Kiran app from the Apple App Store and Google Play to stay updated on the latest news across the Capital area.
Support UWK and its mission to deliver The News You Deserve. Unfiltered. Become a monthly patron on Patreon today!
