That’s why there are cars.
There’s not even any nonstop FLIGHTS on Asheville to Nashville let alone TRAINS
not worth the cost for a longer slower trip than driving
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I partially agree with your statement and would add that especially now after the hurricane, Ashville needs more tourist dollars than ever before. And I for one would love to go to Ashville this time of year via a train to sight see and spend my hard earned money gawking out the windows! 
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There aren’t enough people driving from Asheville to Nashville every day to warrant even having a big interstate highway either, so why did they even bother to build I-40?
Well it’s because of the network.
Airplanes are heavily optimized for point-to-point travel, and lose much of their speed advantage as soon as you have to make a stop over or connecting flight.
Each pair of cities connected makes a link in a network. Each stop a passenger train makes adds roughly 2 to 5 minutes onto the journey time. (Whereas with air travel you lose at least an hour, usually closer to two: RDU-BNA is about 1h 45m nonstop; shortest 1-stop itinerary is 3h 27m)
A rail connection from Asheville to Knoxville allows everybody living on the route east of Asheville to travel to everywhere on the route west of Knoxville.
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The long awaited Amtrak September 2024 monthly performance report is out, and everybody knows what that means, right?
No? You mean you guys don’t religiously scan for new PDFs on Amtrak’s “reports and documents” page every day? Ha. You don’t know what you’re missing.
Anyway, what it means is that it’s time for annual ridership figures.
Piedmont ridership was 361k for FY2024, up from 290k in FY2023. This means in spite of a schedule change to increase frequency in the middle of FY2023, average ridership per train is up from 114 to 124, which is an all-time high.
Still following the pattern: if they increase the number of daily trains by a certain percentage, ridership increases by more than that percentage.
Given how this pattern has held true for over 25 years (with the brief exception of COVID) I would really like to see them lean into it a bit more. Let’s go for hourly service ASAP.
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Couldn’t get a pic, but noticed that NCDOT constructed a permanent(?) concrete platform at the fairgrounds. Looked nice. Unsure if this will be further renovated into the future regional rail station (as detailed in the S-Line plan), but a great improvement for State Fair trains nonetheless.
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Cafe cars coming to the Piedmont. I kinda like the free coffee and vending machine snack setup, though - certainly cheaper.
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Not rail related, but Virginia’s state-supported intercity bus program (Virginia Breeze) is expanding into NC – specifically, Greensboro to Danville.
Virginia Breeze operates two routes from Danville to DC, one via Richmond and one via Charlottesville, which are especially popular with college students in smaller cities. Extending service to Greensboro will allow buses to overlay Amtrak’s Crescent train service, which also links Greensboro to DC via Charlottesville but which has a very annoying schedule.
Virginia Breeze also has services running up I-81 from Bristol past Blacksburg and Harrisonburg up to DC. Virginia also supports a few Amtrak Thruway connecting bus services (within Hampton Roads, between Richmond and Charlottesville, and at Blacksburg).
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I believe they are cooperating with NCDOT, which also had a substantial subsidized intercity bus program, which calls out Winston-Salem ↔ Greensboro ↔ Danville as a route that is new this year.
I do wish that they would coordinate better with the Amtrak Thruway service down east, which is also subsidized by NCDOT.
There are two separate, disconnected, yet subsidized intercity bus systems running in ENC. Doesn’t seem super efficient to me.
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It seems that one of the EOs Trump signed orders the pause of funding from the BIL & IRA.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/21/trump-fight-biden-infrastructure-money-00199796
Curious what the folks here think. Is the S-Line funding safe? Too early to tell? (Gotta think CID might be dead in the water, though 
)
My guess is this was targeted primarily at EVs/charging infrastructure, but I’m scared of what the collateral damage will be.
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Trump has issued a litany of quite expansive executive orders, expecting challenges in court, hoping that a “friendly” supreme court will give him everything he wants, probably figuring that quite a few of them will be rejected, but glad to have sown seeds of chaos and doubt in progressive circles nonetheless.
I am not a constitutional lawyer but I do not think he will have success rescinding grants that have already been awarded under BIL.
Remember that Republicans proclaim opposition to “the administrative state” - which is, effectively, legislatively delgating decisions to agencies. They want legislation to be as specific as possible.
If the BIL spelled specific projects out in the legislation, he’d most likely be out of luck entirely. However, the way BIL is written distributes much of the money it appropriates by way of administratively awarded grants. It makes funds available, but they must be applied for - and the applications must be evaluated and winners determined by executive branch agencies.
This means that Trump may well have success ordering the agencies responsible for administrating the grant programs, to stop the process of awarding more new grants under this law.
But grants already awarded, are most likely water under the bridge by now.
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Translation: if Trump gets what he wants from pausing Biden’s infrastructure grants, most of our major transit projects - BRT, rail, what have you - could all be paused or scrapped unless it’s specifically safeguarded in new bills.
This will probably be in the form of spending bills, so it’ll depend on how the NC delegation to the House can influence the agenda. The key cheerleaders would likely be Deborah Ross, the suburb-loving Brad Knott, and totally-not-a-fascist Richard Hudson, andI can’t picture them agreeing on much (let alone cooperating!) on that end.
We know that Trump’s ready to be far more brazen about wielding the bully pulpit this time around compared to his previous administration (since the Republican party’s much more of a personality cult than an opposing force, now), but it’s still unclear how he will do that. But I also don’t trust our federal courts to sufficiently do its job of checking and balancing elected officials, so the initial vibes are not that great.
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SEHSR to Wake Forest has already been awarded. Trump is probably trying to stop things like this from moving forward, but I do not think courts will let that happen.
BRT, even the corridors without FFGAs, are funded under New Starts/Small Starts, which is not under IRA or BIL, so is not impacted by the Trump executive orders at all.
Things like other rail corridors that may have had the opportunity to get funded under BIL - such as Wake Forest to Richmond, Raleigh to Wilmington, and Salisbury to Asheville, are likely impacted.
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…but regarding even SEHSR. California HSR is a conservative lightning rod because:
- It’s in California
- It’s a monstrously expensive project that hasn’t been well managed
Trump actually isn’t against rail, not strongly at least, and the absolute last thing he is, is an austerity hawk. Building high-speed rail in the US has the potential to fit within his MAGA narrative. So while I certainly wouldn’t get excited, I also wouldn’t write it off completely either. Holding pattern for now on SEHSR.
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And I think the political conversation has gone just about far enough
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Really? I was hoping for a lot more…
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Trump will blow where the winds of his support will take him. Whatever yields him the most power and admiration will shape his decision making. Just look at the TikTok fiasco. He Initiated it in his first administration and now he’s positioning himself as its savior.
And whatever his decision is will be supported by MAGA, even if it flips from one extreme to the other. I mean, we now have a president who didn’t put his hand on the Bible for his oath of office and then said he was saved by God.
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Correct, this new route is being served by Sunway Charters, who also operate the two Amtrak Thruway routes as well as three other routes:
- Boone to Charlotte
- Boone to Greensboro
- Winston-Salem to Fayetteville
- Wilson to Morehead City (Amtrak Thruway)
- Wilson to Wilmington (Amtrak Thruway)
You can find brochures for the first three, as well as the new route to Danville, at the link above. The last two can only be booked through Amtrak, which is pretty annoying.
I’m glad Sunway got this route, though. They seem to be doing well with their current routes, and, honestly, anything is better than Greyhound (though the one I took to Goldsboro on Monday was actually very clean and very on time).
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Booking a ticket on Amtrak Thruway requires at least one journey leg on a train. This was to avoid competing with private intercity operators like Greyhound.
I believe that this is not a statutory requirement, but rather a policy that Amtrak imposes on itself (possibly to avoid making political enemies.) However, it is a significant barrier to efficiency and integration. They should rescind this policy, at least in places where other intercity services are subsidizdd as well - such as here in NC.
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