My experience with Amtrak is the Southern Crescent, which is wildly unreliable - and I understand this is largely not their doing, what with the freights having priority.
Basically Amtrak just provides the crews and (usually, but not for the Piedmont) the trains. Most Amtrak delays boil down to track congestion, which is just as applicable regardless of who owns the trains, or who employs the engineers and conductors.
Part of this effort is about building enough infrastructure (double track etc) to mitigate congestion.
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A questions of logistics, how important is it for regional rail to go electric - for the speed of restarting etc? Do diesel engines hinder the times this greatly? I do realize the scope and costs of electrifying this routes, and it should not stop us from supporting this, but long-term it does seem like an important goal, if it makes a real difference to time & speed of the service.
Electrification would be awesome, but it’s definitely not in the cards for the amount of money we have to spend here.
We have to think “incremental” not “big bang”. There is no magic transit money fountain that will build Swiss-level train service for us. We have to do what we can, with the resources we have. Electrification will have to wait.
One way to reduce the importance of electrification is by stopping trains less often. If trains stop every 5 miles instead of every 2 miles, then the faster acceleration gained from electrification matters less.
Conversely, if you want to add a bunch of infill stops in the future, but don’t want trip times to get longer, one way to do that would be to electrify.
DMUs get part of the way there, but even that may be out of reach for now. If my guess is correct, this service is likely to launch using NCDOT’s refurbished Piedmont fleet.
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Thanks for the write-up.
So, the Piedmont will get new Siemens trainsets towards the end of the decade; and then you suspect this new regional service will get the current Piedmont fleet (to start).
Do you think Amtrak would operate a segment as short as WF-Apex?
I get the desire for urban transit, but 115,000 people live ITB. That’s nowhere near enough to justify a subway.
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At just over 30 miles, Wake Forest-Apex would probably be the shortest Amtrak train in the country, but that’s not quite how I think this would work.
Amtrak contracts with several commuter rail entities as the operator of their trains in places like Maryland, Connecticut, and California. Those trains are not “Amtrak” trains, per se (they don’t generally show up on Amtrak timetables) but the onboard staff are employed by Amtrak.
In most of these cases, tickets are honored reciprocally between Amtrak and the commuter line, but the branding is different.
That’s closer to the sort of arrangement that I would expect from these short-distance Triangle Regional trains.
In fact, I don’t think having Amtrak as the contract operator is a “must” in this case; there are others such as Keolis, First Transit, or RATP who could be contracted to do the same thing. Having Amtrak do it just might be convenient and allow for shared staffing and facilities.
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Thanks!
One more question, does RUS really have the capacity (at full build out) for more Piedmont service, S-Line/SEHSR, Wilmington, Fayetteville, and frequent regional trains?
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The master plan for RUS includes another NCRR platform as well as an S-line platform, in total three platforms, six tracks, I believe. So, yes - I think there should be enough space.
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This is a good service, and maybe a relevant example as it connects a spawling multipolar semi-urban CSA of ~3 million across a 60-mile corridor. Classified as commuter rail but operates more like regional rail with stops approaching 10 miles apart and 12 roundtrips daily, including weekends and off-hours. Freight conflicts avoided with double tracking and sidings on key sections.
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Is that number correct? This says nearly 500k (https://thetriangleluxcollective.com/neighborhoods/raleigh)
To be clear, I get that it isn’t realistic today, especially with the preposterous cost to build in America, but if you want that density to increase we need to intentionally build an environment that facilitates that.
If we use the 500k number many cities started planning and building subways with population densities not that far off from that. It appears DC had a fully built out system in the year 2000 with only ~500k people in the beltway as one example that is similar to ITB Raleigh.
What type of population would Raleigh have ITB by the time something like this would get built? I’d have to imagine you’d see a ton of development momentum to densify around the subway lines if it was announced.
I know they aren’t mutually exclusive necessarily but the commuter rail thing is never going to happen. How many millions of dollars has been wasted on it now? It just seems like there are far too many veto points to ever happen, but my hunch is that wouldn’t be the case if we were going underground and just dealing with a single jurisdiction - but would like to hear from those who understand this better than I do.
Like most on here I wish Raleigh would focus on making ITB as dense and as car free as possible and a subway seems like the best way to introduce a change agent that will take us in that direction. Just my opinion.
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We’re almost at 500k in Raleigh city limits. Not ITB.
While I love the vision and optimism, we can’t even get a BRT built.
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This is why I will talk about walkability downtown until I’m blue in the face. If we can’t get transit, let’s at least concentrate on making our downtown neighborhoods more walkable to more things. Even then I waited 25 years for just a grocery store.
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Not sure if this helps you when you mentioned how would Apex get service, but the July 2023 NC DOT study for the S-Line mentions a couple times Apex building out a potential train station in the future and gives some location ideas.
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Yup – and this planning effort is part of the reason why I’m so optimistic about the whole thing. I was more referring to how it doesn’t seem feasible for Amtrak to run a very short WF-Apex segment, and it’s obviously a deviation off the NCRR so routing existing services down there wouldn’t work either.
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