I wonder where this commuter bus will stop in Raleigh 
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Same. I heard at the ribbon cutting that RUSBUS is in fact big enough for coach buses and Greyhound but Greyhound doesn’t want to navigate the street network nearby.
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This is a good start and I hope it survives and triggers expansion. I assume the bus will use the Tar River Transit downtown transfer station adjacent to the Amtrak station in Rocky Mount.
The irony in referring to the NCDMV facility in the press release is that Tar River Transit doesn’t serve it unless you’re willing to walk 4000 feet from the nearest bus stop.
As for Raleigh, Greyhound appears to be happy with their station on Capital Blvd. Easy in and out. Megabus likes it too. In theory it’s still possible to take Megabus to NY. But you have to construct your own routing Sanford-Greensboro-Danville-NY and it would probably take forever.
Before the pandemic I had mapped out a trip from Raleigh to Mt Airy using only local bus service. Don’t know whether it’s still possible.
GoRaleigh 36 leaves neighborhood at 7:08 am, arrives Crabtree at 7:25 am.
GoRaleigh 6 leaves Crabtree at 7:45 am, arrives Raleigh at 8:12 am.
GoTriangle 100 leaves Raleigh 8:45 am, arrives RTP Regional Transit Center at 9:25 am.
GoTriangle 800 leaves RTP at 10:00 am, arrives Chapel Hill UNC Hospitals at 10:40 am.
PART 4 leaves UNC Hospitals at 11:15 am, arrives Greensboro Coble Transportation Center at 1:07 pm.
PART 1 leaves Coble at 1:45 pm, arrives Winston-Salem Transportation Center at 2:15 pm.
PART 6 leaves W-S at 4:40 pm, arrives Mount Airy Park & Ride at 5:35 pm.
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Norfolk Southern has agreed to sell itself to Union Pacific, creating the first coast to coast freight rail service. This may, or may not, effect rail plans for NC. It will be interesting to see if a) this is approved by the Feds and b) what if any effect this has on NCRail plans.
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This would make Union Pacific solidly the largest freight rail company. I don’t really see this being a good thing for them in terms of getting them to play ball on passenger rail projects or caring about their reputation locally
Union Pacific corridor map
Norfolk Southern corridor map
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After the UP+NS and the inevitable BNSF+CSX deals are consummated, I expect we will see numerous selloffs of ex-NS and ex-CSX lines that have low or medium traffic density (except where the traffic is long-haul). This means the Class II operators like G&W will have many opportunities to acquire and operate lines. In NC, lines like Salisbury-Asheville-Morristown, Henderson-Raleigh-Hamlet, Contentnea-Goldsboro-Wallace, Durham-Oxford, etc will all be under scrutiny. Fasten your seat belts.
The big loser in UP+NS will be Chicago. Until now, UP has wanted to maximize its revenue from east-west traffic by forcing interchange at Chicago. But I expect much of that interchange with NS will instead move through downstate Illinois, Memphis, or New Orleans.
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So is this a good thing, a bad thing or unknown?
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Amtrak almost never runs on Class II or even more rarely class III railroads, as these would be. I’d say that it’s probably bad for Amtrak but I would be curious to hear what they think at the Surface Transportation Board.
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Amtrak’s Ethan Allen Express and Vermonter run partly on non-Class I trackage in New England. Amtrak also operates over some segments of track that were sold off by Class I’s to commuter agencies such as SunRail in Florida. But >95% of Amtrak’s train-miles outside the Northeast Corridor are on the Class I’s: BNSF, CN, CPKC, CSX, NS, or UP. But it doesn’t have to be that way as long as track standards are maintained.
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Yup. It’s not impossible for it to be good for Amtrak as some Class IIs/IIIs would love to have Amtrak service. It just means that Amtrak or NC would likely have to bear more of the costs of PTC, if not already installed and track improvements would also fall more heavily on Amtrak and the state.
However they would also probably do a better job at giving Amtrak priority and allow Amtrak to do more modifications of the fixed plant.
In Portland, they built a commuter rail line (WES) on a Class III and the RR has kind of regretted it, since it inadvertently reduced their freight capacity. They had to trust TRI-MET’s modeling as they couldn’t afford to do their own, so consented without a clear picture of what it would do to them.
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Completely different topic, but my train back from Charlotte yesterday was 1.5 hours late because the tracks were too hot and it had to run at a slower speed… I didn’t know this was a thing.
I googled it, and if the cut-off is 95 degrees ambient, are the trains not delayed basically every day in NC summers?
It happened to me a lot last summer. I have been avoiding the train and just driving since it has been so hot. Pro-tip: When you get on the train, go straight to the snack car and sit in a booth for the ride. It is usually cooler in there.
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Train wheels will always be the same distance apart from each other (that’s their gauge) - so the two rails on a train track need to be clamped apart at that same, constant distance. The problem is that, just like how tire pressures in cars and bikes go up in hotter weather, metals expand as temperature go up, too. So if you have metal bars that wants to expand but they can’t expand sideways, then you have to compensate - which means a bumpier ride for you.
And in some cases, dangerously bumpy. Network Rail (the agency that owns almost all British rail infrastructure) has a website on this exact issue, and you can see what happens:
If trains go through that and are going too fast, worst-case scenario, they could pop off of the tracks and derail.
There’s ways around this (e.g. painting rails white in the summer so that they reflect the Sun’s heat instead of absorbing it, having more complex joints between rails that deal with thermal expansion in smarter ways) - but all of them cost money and engineering effort.
And I challenge you to tell me with a straight face that Norfolk Southern will give a damn about that.
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They’re often called sun kinks. Continuous welded rail (CWR) can withstand an enormous amount of compression in summer and tension in winter. Not only are the rails clipped to the crossties, the crossties themselves are held in place by the jagged ballast. This is one reason why there’s a “ballast shoulder” with the rocks extending laterally on either side of the rails.
The railroads choose a target “rail temperature” for CWR where the stresses inside the rail would be neutral. Obviously this target temperature is higher in the South than it would be in, say, Maine. The tradeoff is sun kinks in summer versus pull-aparts in winter. When ambient temperatures and sustained sunshine raise the rail temperature too far above the target, railroads impose speed limits. In the winter, if rails contract and pull apart, the signal mechanism will detect the break and warn oncoming trains. But sun kinks don’t provide a warning.
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The resolution just signaled support of the concept without any detail, but it seems like the local governments of NE NC are really wanting expanded rail connectivity to the rest of the state. This corridor was one of the many submitted by the state to the federal Corridor ID program, but was not selected in the first, and so far only, round of selections. If there are any more Corridor ID selections in the future, hopefully this tips things in their favor.
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The article has a misleading statement. “NCDOT, the resolution says, has acquired critical rights of way from CSX to facilitate intercity passenger rail corridors, including a corridor between Raleigh and Weldon.” Not really. NCDOT has a deal for Norlina-Raleigh as part of the SEHSR S-line project between Petersburg and Raleigh. Weldon is not on the S-line. There is a separate line, called the SA line, that originally ran Norlina-Weldon-Portsmouth. The Weldon-Portsmouth line remains in place, but the SA line between Norlina and Roanoke Rapids was abandoned and pulled up.
There was an alternative proposal for SEHSR trains to run Norlina-Petersburg via Weldon, using the A-line north of Weldon, but as far as I know this alternative proposal is not being pursued and the deal between NCDOT and CSX does not include Norlina-Weldon.
It’s true that residents in the Roanoke Rapids area have to drive to Petersburg or Rocky Mount to catch a passenger train, but that’s easily fixed by adding a station at Weldon. Even if SEHSR is built (don’t hold your breath), not all passenger trains would move off the A-line onto the S-line.
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A picture is worth…
Purple is the A-line.
Red is the NCRR/NS line.
Green is the S-line. Dotted portion is currently pulled up.
Orange is the SA-line. Dotted portion is currently pulled up.
Today’s trains run Raleigh-Selma-Rocky Mount-Weldon-Petersburg and beyond.
The primary SEHSR proposal is Raleigh-Norlina-Petersburg and beyond.
What Halifax County seems to want is Raleigh-Norlina-Weldon-Petersburg and beyond.
The SA line will never be suited for high speed. Moreover there has been considerable ROW enroachment (legally) on the Roanoke Rapids end of the abandoned portion.
If you want the fastest possible service between Raleigh and the northeast, the primary SEHSR proposal is the way to get it.
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Although the tracks were pulled up long ago, the SA line was never officially abandoned - and CSX owns the right-of-way. This has always been part of the S-line negotiations.
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Whether it was technically abandoned at the STB or not, the Halifax County GIS map shows about 4 miles between Bolling Road and Stonegate Rd in Roanoke Rapids as no longer ROW.
Most of the 110 mph running for SEHSR would be in southern Virginia on the S-line. If you run over the SA instead, you’re stuck with 36 slow miles between Norlina and Weldon. Even SAL/SCL’s best train took 58 minutes over that segment. The opportunity to increase speed on the SA line is limited. If the goal for SEHSR is truly 2:00 flat between Raleigh and Petersburg, I don’t see how you ever regain the time you lose by running via Weldon. If the goal isn’ t 2:00 flat, then it’s unclear to me that the project is worth it at all. Just restore all the missing second track between Selma and Petersburg on the A-line, put the speed limit back to 90 mph like it was pre-1967, and call it a day.
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Cross-posting from the RTP thread:
…also, the slide deck linked to something we haven’t really seen since the commuter/regional rail study shut down: concrete steps for how to make regional heavy rail happen using existing tracks in the Triangle.
The idea, now, is to build “an incremental rail expansion strategy” so that rail infrastructure gets added over time as our region keeps growing and getting denser - so that, when we’re ready for Attempt 4™, it would actually cost a future train operator less money to make it happen. This strategy seems to consist of four steps (there’s five of them in the slides, but the fifth is more of a project management thing):
1. Evaluate concepts for intercity rail service
…and by “intercity”, I think they mean “regional”. The slide listed these six segments as ones that they could consider:
The colors are different service patterns:
- Mebane - Clayton: 3 round trips per day
- Apex - Wake Forest: 3 round trips per day on its own
- Durham - Raleigh: 3 round trips per day on its own
- Lillington - Raleigh: 3 round trips per day
- Durham - Carrboro: 3 round trips per day
- Sanford - Franklinton: this is on the map but I don’t think this is included in the math for number of round trips
…and the way that these routes overlap mean that certain segments get more round trips; I think that’s what the number of round trips in the black-and-white boxes mean. Specifically:
- Durham - Cary: 6 total round trips per day (3 from Raleigh-Durham + 3 from Mebane-Clayton)
- Cary - Raleigh: 9 total round trips per day (6 from above + 3 from Apex-WF)
2. Figure out what capital projects each service concept would need
These are things like…
3. For each capital project, predict how attractive they are for state and federal investments
The slide suggests prioritizing in this order:
Why aren’t stations listed in any of those six steps? That’s because we need to…
4. Produce a decision tree for making investments - strategically
There’s different, easier ways to pay for the above - and TWTPO seems to think it’s easier to use those “lamer” projects as a lay up so that the flashy, politically riskier station projects can become a slam dunk. 
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