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
2 Likes
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! 
4 Likes
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.
11 Likes
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.
27 Likes
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.
12 Likes