Intercity Passenger Rail in North Carolina

[paytonc]

@CivilFuture

If Charlotte’s Gateway Station ever opens, ridership would explode. Currently, Raleigh to Charlotte is only ~30 min more than by car.

In terms of time penalty, the 20-30 minutes of travel to get from the North Tryon station (does it even have a name? Charlotte Southern Station?) to, well, anywhere is probably the easiest to fix.

@ctillnc

passenger railroading in the U.S. was entirely a private sector affair. Like most RRs in the 1960s, Southern saw passenger trains as just a menace to its financial health. Ridership was falling, trains were being discontinued left and right, and Southern had no incentive to spend its own money (no government subsidy back then!) on a more substantial station.

Also worth noting that the attitude of governments at the time was not just “we’re not going to help,” it was “these railroad companies are made out of money(1), so we are going to use every regulatory tool we have to extract as much value as we can out of them.”

1. Indeed, many of the great fortunes of the prior two generations were made in railroads and more importantly the ancillary businesses they enabled – never mind that was already yesterday’s news and that the “underdog” auto industry had become the new titans

@keita

This implies that the second floor of the station building would’ve been the Amtrak area, while the ground floor was for buses (as things are today)

Oh, so that’s what the second floor of that station is for.