How feasible is Charlotte-Wilmington as it stands currently? Seems like it could be brought on line with pretty minimal effort, as long as obtaining track use for passenger rail wasn’t insanely difficult. I’m pretty sure Monroe and Hamlet are the only ones on that list that still have physical stations (can’t tell if the CSX Lumberton building was a station or not), and I feel like those would suffice initially with some of the other notable cities on that corridor being added in at a later time.
Driving from Charlotte to Wilmington is 3.5 hours on a good day, and if the trains could run ~80 mph could probably make the trip in around 3 hrs since they wouldn’t be getting bogged down in Marshville and Wadesboro (which idk is worth building a station at since the tracks don’t run through the center of town).
Rockingham does still have their old station, which now houses the Richmond County Tourism Development Authority (but is waaaaay too close to Hamlet to bother with).
Edit - Maxton surprisingly still has its depot building, but it is in need of repair, and is closer to Laurinburg than Pembroke is.
Charlotte-Wilmington service is desirable, and probably feasible. I would also say the same thing about Charlotte-Fayetteville.
These corridors are much lower priority, for the simple reason of population density between Charlotte and Wilmington.
Union County (Monroe etc) is obviously a fast-growing exurban region, and so is Leland/Navassa in Brunswick County across the river from Wilmington - but there just isn’t much population between, given the corridor is nearly 180 miles.
Three of the towns along the way each measure in the range of 15~20,000 people:
Rockingham/Hamlet
Laurinburg
Lumberton
It falls off rapidly from there, with the next town, Wadesboro, weighing in at only 5,000.
Do I think these corridors would be useful, absolutely! But compared with the millions of people along the Piedmont corridor, or with the shorter, denser corridors radiating south and east from Raleigh, there just isn’t as much potential.
Charlotte-Wilmington via Fayetteville would hypothetically make a much stronger corridor, but the rail infrastructure is just not laid out to support this. The amount of greenfield construction that it would take for this to happen makes it a pipe dream.
Here’s this week’s CityNerd video that maps out the top 56 city pairs that should be served by rail using a methodology that he explains in the video.
Interestingly, his methodology pairs Charlotte with Atlanta and Raleigh-Durham with DC before finally connecting Raleigh and Charlotte via a Charlotte-DC paring at the end of the list.
I’d rather go to DC than Charlotte any day, so works for me. LOL. And if you love Charlotte enough to actually live there, you’ll probably love going to Atlanta…
Alon Levy did a high speed rail map that uses similar methodology.
The results are very similar.
I actually prefer City Nerd’s way of using travel time squared as the denominator, rather than distance. Quite elegant!
But while City Nerd’s methodology evaluates city pairs first, then just puts them on a map, and bends and arranges the route to follow what seems like a logical network - Levy’s way of evaluating routes first draws a network, then calculates the strength of each link in the network by adding up the demand for all travel through the link, rather than only considering the value of each city pair separately. As a result, some links that come up short if considered as an individual city pair, wind up making the grade when considered as the aggregate of all overlapping travel over the link. Hence, Chicago-Florida makes the grade.
It’s hard to imagine a high speed rail network that doesn’t connect Miami more directly to the Northeast without diverting through Atlanta. Neither of these methodologies puts it on the map. Also, I didn’t get from the video that CityNerd accounted for projected growth/decline/stagnation in population as a variable in establishing his pairs.
I’ve always felt like DC had more gravitational pull to Raleigh than Raleigh has to Atlanta. Now I have an objective source for validating that feeling.
This is what I think should be pursued. Dark blue and silver are already in place, light blue potential expansion based on existing tracks and popularity.
Other than extending service from Greensboro to Winston-Salem, I think Selma to Wilmington, and Charlotte to Wilmington, are the two no-brainers. If CSX would cooperate on the Charlotte line, it might actually be the easier of the two considering that it wouldn’t need track reconstruction outside of downtown Wilmington. Both corridors are pretty sparsely populated which should help travel times be competitive with driving.
I feel like Asheville is honestly kind of tricky. Salisbury-Asheville seems to be the easiest route, but from a practical perspective is probably the least convenient for basically everyone outside of Salisbury. It’s somewhat indirect from the Triangle and Triad (and especially Charlotte), and might need a transfer depending on how it is tied in with the Piedmont/Carolinian. Although it will take some time getting into the mountains, so I guess a few minutes here and there doesn’t really move the needle that much.
But all in all, if we were able to build a rail network similar to this, with the two cities on each end being served by multiple routes, and the cities in the middle being interconnected by a number of different routes, we’d have one of the most robust rail networks out there.
Miami-Northeast is too far of a distance for HSR to ever be competitive with flying. According to that video HSR competitiveness peaks at around 250 miles and disappears around 750. Even the shortest conceivable Northeast<->Florida pair, Washington/Jacksonville barely comes in below that mark. Miami-NYC is nearly 1300 miles, which is an 8+ hour trip at 160mph average speed - way outside of HSR range!
Yeah, the 95 corridor has quite a few cities that would benefit from a line that extends the full distance. In fact the “largest” city in the US, Jax, could be a big adopter of HSR both north and south.
I-95 is notorious for congestion, but when people talk about the “I-95 corridor” they’re mostly talking about the northeast - effectively, from Richmond to Boston.
South of Richmond, however, traffic counts are actually not all that high. A large proportion of the traffic is trucks, to be sure, but at every point along the I-95 corridor between Richmond and Jacksonville, it’s much less busy than anywhere on the I-85 corridor between Raleigh and Charlotte. And it’s easy to see why: after you pass Richmond heading southbound on I-95, you don’t pass through another million-plus metro area until Jacksonville!
There’s a reason the I-95 corridor is not ideal for high speed rail. It’s not where the people are! It’s flyover country. FLY being the operative word.
50 years in the future, if:
*carbon taxes have made air travel more expensive
*the sunbelt is still booming despite the increasing heat
*coastal Florida is not underwater
*we have already built everything on that map
*we have paid off the bonds, and are just looking for somewhere to reinvest those rail profits
Then, MAYBE, a Charlotte-Columbia-Savannah-Jacksonville route bypassing Atlanta might be worth a look. But crossing the deep south without a stopover to serve the 6+ million people in Atlanta is always going to be a tough sell, and bypassing Charlotte in order to head due south from Raleigh is an absolute non-starter.
That I-95 drive from Richmond to Jax is a whole lot of nuttin’ but pine trees. It’s right up there on the boring scale as I-70 between KC and Denver, Or I-20 through west Texas.
Super late response but I feel like Kannapolis is one of the more underrated stops on the line. There have been a ton of residential units added recently within a handful of blocks from the station, and more is on the way. Plus the baseball stadium is right there.
Not sure what the current downtown population figures are, but certainly once the stadium lofts (nearing completion), Vida 2 (currently stalled), and some other stuff in the pipeline are all competed, Kannapolis will probably have more residents within easy walking distance to the station than most of the other stations in the Piedmont corridor.
How could I forget about Pedro. Yes - and there are also about 500 South of the Border Billboards in each direction.
I must say I have passed this more times then I can recall since I was a kid in Columbia in the 80’s, and have never stopped there. I always wonder who actually stops. But people must stop there, or they would have been out of business long ago.
