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Terry Mulcahy receives ProRail's Friend of Passenger Rail Award Award named for ProRail co-founder Pat Robbins 1/24/2004

ProRail's Friend of Passenger Rail Award depicts Pat Robbins

Wisconsin’s former Secretary of Transportation Terry Mulcahy was honored today by ProRail members and friends for his leadership in that post in advancing a modern vision for rail passenger service in Wisconsin, the Midwest, and nationally.

For that service, he is the first recipient of the Pat Robbins Memorial Friend of Passenger Rail Award. He also was the main speaker at today's ProRail meeting.

For more on Mulcahy's background, click here.

The ceremonies included the official unveiling of the ProRail award, which contains a bronze bas-relief portrait of ProRail’s co-founder and long-time officer and newsletter editor who died Nov. 1, 2002. Participating in the ceremonies was Pat’s brother, Bob Robbins of Columbus, Ohio.

The meeting also marked ProRail’s 19th anniversary. It was established in January 1985 by about two dozen area passenger train advocates, and has only grown in size and influence since. It’s the largest locally-based rail passenger advocacy and travel group in Wisconsin.

The event was held at the Bavaria Restaurant, 7459 Elmwood Ave., in Middleton.

Among those present were former Wisconsin Transportation Secretary Ron Fiedler, Ron Adams, Randy Wade and LeAnna Wall from WisDOT, Dave Kollmar of Chicago, representing Amtrak, and rail advocates from Milwakee, La Crosse and Chicago.

Mulcahy told the group that everything now was in place for track work to bring trains to Madison, including the filing of the environmental impact study and the completion of the engineering surveys. The big remaining question was when the necessary Federal funding would be provided.

Here are condensed portions of a tribute to Pat Robbins, as published in the most recent issue of ProRail’s newsletter, Keeping Track:

Remarkable to relate, few members of ProRail can claim to have known Pat Robbins well, despite her importance in the organization.

She was one of the founders (together with Scott Leonard and Mike McCoy) of what has turned out to be a flourishing chapter of WisARP but her importance reached far beyond its creation: for 17 years she was the soul of it, getting out Keeping Track every month, presiding though she never held the office of President over monthly board meetings, arranging for monthly membership meetings, encouraging, wheedling, pushing, pulling, exhorting, and encouraging both the general membership and "her" board to do their best to promote the improvement (or, failing that, preservation) of passenger rail service in Wisconsin and the country as a whole.

She was similarly vigorous in the affairs of WisARP. No one, proverbially, is indispensable, but Pat Robbins was a close second: even before her sudden death a year ago she had given up the office of Vice President, whose main function was to make all the arrangements, program and otherwise, for the two annual statewide membership meetings.

Those who were involved in trying to put on those meetings after Pat passed the torch felt mighty like the Three Stooges trying to make a wedding cake. It was a quick (and disconcerting) lesson in an important fact of life: nothing happens by itself. When Pat had her hand on the tiller it was easy to fall into the illusion that things did, in fact, happen by themselves.

In and among (her) pastimes, she held a series of increasingly important positions at the Legislative Research Bureau, finally for several years being the individual in charge of editing the annual Blue Book, one of the Bureau's most important and demanding publications.

The debt that ProRail and WisARP -- ProRail in particular -- owe her is hard to calculate. And Pat's influence continues in more mundane ways. Her brother, Bob Robbins has made ProRail a gift of $10,000 in Pat's name.