The ‘River and Rails’ Tourism Connections

story by Roby Brock

(Editor’s note: For a complete version of this story, watch for updates at www.talkbusiness.net.)

It’s a glorious fall weekend in Arkansas.

The Razorbacks are playing a Saturday night football game in Fayetteville. From Little Rock, you and your spouse decide to take off from work Friday, catch a boat ferry up the Arkansas River to the wine country in Altus.

By afternoon, you are sampling vineyard vintage creations. Then up river to Van Buren, where you’ll port at the marina and stay in an area hotel or bed & breakfast for the evening.  You sample the local music scene in Fort Smith that night after throwing back a couple of cold ones and dogging on a plate-sized mega-burrito at Rolando’s on Garrison Avenue. The next morning brings some light shopping up and down Main Street in Van Buren before catching a train ride through the color-bursting Ozark Mountains to Fayetteville in advance of tailgating with local friends before the game.

The Hogs whip Alabama by four touchdowns, which makes therest of the night on Dickson Street one for the ages. Back to your hotel for some shut-eye.  The next morning, you sleep in, have a late breakfast, and begin the return trip by rail and by river.  You’ve got to be at work Monday morning.

Sound like a pipe dream? Maybe the Alabama beatdown.  But the rest of the scenario is moving toward reality.

“That’s one of the many mini-vacations that we see as a possibility,” said commercial developer Greg Nabholz, one of the champions of the Arkansas River Connection (ARC).

The ARC is a dedicated coalition of economic development leaders from Eureka Springs to Pine Bluff interested in utilizing the Arkansas River as the common transportation thread to a series of tourism attractions from the Ozark Mountains to the mighty Mississippi River.

Nabholz, a commercial developer who has spearheaded redevelopment projects in downtown Conway and North Little Rock, is one of more than 50 individuals who began meeting four years ago to talk about the project. A meeting at Weiderkehr village in August 2004 to discuss ways to develop the wine country region of the state around Altus and Ozark was the impetus for examining a larger undertaking. When the proposition of a train tour from northwest Arkansas to Ozark was suggested, Nabholz recalled recent conversations he’d had about river and rail travel opportunities with officials in North Little Rock and Eureka Springs.

“It was really a compilation of a bunch of people talking about how great it would be to do things along the Arkansas River,” Nabholz said. “Everybody just seemed to be talking about a lot of the same things, but it was the classic case of the left hand and the right hand not knowing about it.”

He pushed for a meeting with a group of community leaders interested in those ideas. The group formally organized as a 501(c) (6), and now the Arkansas River Connection boasts representatives from 15 counties and 13 river communities. They meet three to four times a year as necessary in person, by conference call, or a hybrid of the two.

The challenge is to develop a largely privately-funded way to connect the different points from northwest Arkansas to southeast Arkansas through a rail station and marina-based port-of-call infrastructure. The rail service largely exists in northwest Arkansas through the Arkansas-Missouri Railroad, but the river piece to this puzzle is in its infancy. If the ARC can bring this vision to reality, you won’t have to own a boat to connect with the envisioned marina-based travel centers and drop-off points to a number of attractions and adventures.

Tourism churns $6 billion per year through the Arkansas economy, according to the most recent calculations from the state’s Department of Parks and Tourism.  

Joe David Rice, Arkansas’ tourism director, said competition for the almighty tourism dollar never rests. He said Arkansas tourism leaders are constantly fighting the “been there, done that” syndrome increasingly common among today’s savvy and sophisticated travelers.

“They’ve experienced lots of intriguing destinations and they have higher standards and expectations. If we’re to compete, we must continually improve our product offerings,” Rice said.

He also suggests that a project like the Arkansas River Connection will need “critical mass,” a concept easily depicted in the auto industry where local car dealerships

Maryl Koeth is the director of the Van Buren Advertising and Promotion Commission. She’s also been active on the Arkansas River Connection project in large part because her city would be the central transition point between the river and the rail lines that extend into northwest Arkansas.

“We know that all across the state, the river is an asset, an untapped resource,” Koeth said.

Already, there are a number of train tours from Van Buren through Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers and into Missouri. More train travelers could equate to more frequency, more cars and more lines say ARC officials. There has even been discussion of a link between rail service in Gateway along the Arkansas-Missouri border to a trolley or shuttle service in Eureka Springs.

Koeth said Van Buren and Fort Smith are at the “center of the universe, the perfect position” to bring the ARC project together. She notes Fort Smith’s forthcoming U.S. Marshal’s Museum that will locate along the Arkansas River as well as its current amphitheater and redeveloping historic downtown district that extends to the river’s banks. She sees the ARC as a way to get many of the communities along the path to move their tourism concepts from idea to implementation.

“A lot of these communities along the river already had a vision. They just didn’t know how to bring those visions to life,” Koeth said.