We were just talking about how NCDOT got an FTA grant for S-Line planning:
I’d thought NCDOT was considering S-Line as just a Southeast High-Speed Rail corridor, so everything about that grant was news to me – Wake Forest definitely wouldn’t be a SEHSR stop, and Apex and Sanford are beyond the SEHSR corridor entirely. So obviously, NCDOT is thinking about the S-Line within a regional rail context, not just SEHSR.
NJ Transit, MARC, and CTrail are the obvious counterparts for state level agencies running commuter trains. A lot of Amtrak’s shorter routes blur the distinctions between commuter and intercity – obviously NCDOT’s Piedmont, but perhaps more interestingly the Caltrans corridor services (Capitols, San Joaquin, Surfliner) which are “state supported” but run by regional agencies.
The US is otherwise largely missing the “regional rail” scale that the Triangle corridor is probably best suited for, akin to TER services in France or RegioBahn in Germany. These are usually run by states.
(Speaking of France, their “public” railway companies are, like Amtrak, technically just corporations entirely owned by the government. So, in the US, they’re considered “private operators” who have contracts to operate transit services for public authorities. VRE is a Virginia-funded authority which contracts train operations to Keolis, a “private operator” which is mostly owned by SNCF, a railway corporation owned by the French government. At Union Station in DC, you can then transfer to a DC Streetcar or DC Circulator bus, operated for the DC government by RATP, a different railway corporation also owned by France which mostly runs urban & commuter rail around Paris. MARC’s Penn Line is run by Amtrak, on Amtrak’s tracks, but under MARC’s brand.)