Nonstop service from Raleigh to Wilmington would easliy be time-competitive with driving.
The route via Goldsboro is 134 rail miles, slightly longer than the 131 mile distance driving via I-40, but except for the diamond in Selma and the connection in Goldsboro, a train would do 79mph flat-out for almost the entire way, which I’d say is a bit faster than most people would probably drive. So given all that, it’d probably be just about a dead heat between the train and a congestion-free drive.
However, when you factor in stops in Clayton, Selma, Goldsboro, and two more TBD places along the way, without a boost in speeds between to 90 or 110mph - there’s no way around the train being a bit slower.
Especially serving Goldsboro Union Station is going to add quite a bit of time onto the schedule because the route to the station involves several tight turns.
I think ridership is the metric not car displacement - which is inherent in the choice to begin with since a train trip by definition disrupts car trips. Even in the examples above people are choosing the train over a car for whatever reason makes sense to them.
Is the push back that ridership would NOT increase if trains were faster and/or cheaper than cars or that ridership isn’t important to begin with?
I do not think Goldsboro should be cut, period. Probably a suburban Raleigh station in Clayton just flat-out makes sense, too. Selma I could go either way, but Amtrak already stops there and it’s a potential connection with the trains running on the A-line. Not to mention it’s evidently fairly popular with the antiquing crowd.
But Burgaw, Wallace, etc are probably political in order to give Duplin and Pender counties something to show for it. I get it, sorta, but they might literally be net negatives for ridership, which would be bad.
Anyway, 2h30m is just 25% slower than driving, which is in the ballpark (especially if you include a stop for gas, lunch, or bathroom) and will be reasonable enough for folks to consider it as an alternative.
The Piedmont is pretty much the same between Raleigh and Charlotte: 3h15m on the train, vs 2h35m driving - again, 25% slower, but quite a few people still seem to ride it. When I’ve ridden to Charlotte I certainly didn’t have that frustrated feeling that I could have been there so much sooner if I had driven.
Whereas the times proposed between Asheville and Salisbury… 3h45m vs 2h10m, a 75% time penalty - just don’t quite seem to be as reasonable and might prove to be more frustrating.
Will this line be dedicated for passenger service?
And since I’m assuming the answer is No, how active is this corridor for freight and how often will these trains likely be delayed due to freight lines?
Easy fix. Build a new train station south. The old station will be a historic re-purposed property like a food hall. Wroclaw in Poland did this with their old station.
From the article @Christopher linked it is promoted as a 2nd frieght link to Wilmington, shorter route to the big CSX intermodel yrd, and the military wants the redundency. That last one should help land an additional pot of federal money, I would think.
And that’s assuming you don’t hit traffic on I-40, which is nearly impossible on, say, a Friday afternoon in the summer. I know construction has made the portion east of Raleigh far worse, but even so.
I don’t expect they’d want to do this considering that they already have a beautiful historic depot that they a) are actively restoring and b) recently added a brand new bus station to it.
You’d have to build the station pretty far out of town to maintain access to serve Wilmington and New Bern, which NCDOT is also hoping to do someday. There’s also a cemetery in the way at the only good spot.
I realize that the number of at-grade crossings along the route would probably make this infeasible for the foreseeable future, but ideally (especially heading south out of Goldsboro) these trains should be absolutely hauling outside of downtowns. Like 110 mph at the bare minimum. It’s almost dead straight from Faison to Wilmington and a lot of that has to be rebuilt anyway.
“We are working closely with Amtrak and NCDOT to bring a train from Raleigh to Pinehurst daily on tournament days of the U.S. Open,” White said. “This will be very convenient for people staying in Raleigh as they will avoid having to drive down, park, wait for buses, etc. We hope this will alleviate some traffic off the local roads.
This is very cool. I’m also going to the US Open. Three of us are heading down, so I will have to see how the numbers work out, but this is a great option, particularly for anyone heading down solo.
NC is really upping its train game, which is great to see. I used to live in DC and the train was by far the best way to get to other big cities like NYC.
Try thinking outside of the box. There’s a perfectly useful, but unused ROW which was abandoned in 1931, but has not been encroached upon in the past century. It’s the old Midland Railroad, which was only built between Smithfield and Goldsboro in the 1880’s.
It ran roughly parallel to the North Carolina Railroad, cutting to the north on the eastern side of Princeton (at ‘Midland Junction’). The only trick would be to tunnel under 795 and 117. The original route split the wye and ran down Center Street to the old Goldsboro Union Depot.
But, it looks like there’s enough undeveloped land, that it could be easily angled down to the current Goldsboro Union Station.
