It’s wild to me how disconnected Nashville is from the rest of the rail network.
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TIL that there’s mainline rail closer to the CLT terminal than to BWI or EWR.
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Yep, and it’s trenched too. It’s even closer than like half of the parking. Super low-hanging fruit. Charlotte needs to just drop the Silver Line for now and focus on quick, easy wins like that.
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Kings Mountain is a bit of a head scratcher but Gastonia and CLT airport are definitely not.
CLT should be making plans to relocate all their land-side facilities to directly adjacent to the rail line.
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Isnt a casino in Kings Mnt?
Yes, Two Kings Casino is in Kings Mountain.
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Update: another FRA document released earlier this afternoon includes a slightly-modified version of this map, which distinguishes the construction grants (bold and labeled) from the planning grants:
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Ohh right. For some reason I was thinking that line went from through Statesville but looking more closely it definitely doesn’t.
What I was mainly going at was connecting W-S by rail in a way that would logically and conveniently link it to the two largest nearest cities (Charlotte and Greensboro), open up the ability to add a few more notable municipalities to the rail network, and eventually incorporate commuter rail between some of the stops. The towns along the I-77 corridor north of Charlotte are growing pretty rapidly, and Mooresville in particular (which currently has a slightly higher population than Wake Forest) is starting to see some legit urban development in its downtown. It’s about a third of the way from Charlotte to W-S so it would be nice to leverage the growth there and connect it to the two nearest large cities. Opening up that corridor from Charlotte to W-S should also more easily allow for a Charlotte-Huntersville-Cornelius-Davidson-Mooresville commuter rail as well as a Winston Salem-Kernersville-Greensboro-Burlington commuter rail.
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I think WS-Charlotte may have won a corridor ID grant if they had chosen to apply for WSSB-NCRR via Lexington/Salisbury instead of the route that they did.
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Amtrak’s Floridian that ran Chicago-Nashville-Florida was discontinued in 1979. This was a “hard luck” train, bedeviled by inadequate track between Chicago and Kentucky. Several routes were tried, and the only one that worked was a slow route (ex-Monon) that didn’t go through Indianapolis. The Floridian would have done better if it had been routed through Atlanta instead of Alabama, but that wasn’t feasible at the time.
Anyway, if the Floridian had held on, Nashville would be on the route map today.
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Montana and ND are going to have two different passenger rail lines?
Long way to improve ridership numbers. More trains, better trains, and the extension to Wake Forest should be easy ways to get those ridership numbers up. Adding a lot of housing and work places at the train stations should be a no-brainer.
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To me, this already looks pretty good! Adding up the piedmont and the Carolinian (as they’re grouped together just about everywhere else) puts us at 605,736—the top of the list.
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Is DC to Norfolk and Newport News really 2 different trains and routes? I am slightly befuddled how they figure their numbers
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Oddly enough, yes (source):
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There’s never been a railroad crossing of the James River east of Richmond – so to service Norfolk the train has to stay south of the James River the entire way from Richmond. Note that there are seven road crossings of the James, including the three bridge/tunnels in Hampton Roads. For some reason, Virginia maintains the James as a deepwater navigable channel up to Richmond, which is why that VA-895 bridge is so dang high above I-95, and any rail crossing would also have to negotiate that.
Most of the Newport News trains have onward bus connections to Norfolk and Virginia Beach.
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Thanks for this!
After @colbyjd3 posted the maps it did occur to me that there were no rr bridges, particularly connectin the triple Ns.
There are also plans for a big new station in uptown (downtown) Charlotte as well as a rail yard there. Hopefully someday they’ll introduce direct, non-stop service from RUS to CLT, that would shave quite a bit of time off the trip since you wouldn’t need to slow down or stop. They’ve already added a few routes that skip some stations, which is good, but not quite the same.
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If they could somehow ever get that down to 1 hour it would be a game changer
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It certainly would! That’s a pretty tall order though. We’d likely need to electrify the whole length, probably make other improvements along the tracks, (eliminate any remaining at-grade crossings as well as straighten track and probably add safety features) and then buy all new trainsets (which would be around $80-$100 million each at current prices). That’s likely several hundred million dollars of investment. Certainly feasible but much more ambitious than anything currently under consideration.
I’d love to see 10-15 trains a day between the two cities, including express trains and non-stop trains. I would absolutely love to see new trainsets, but NCDOT seems content to refurbish old locomotives while other states invest in new equipment. With the Siemens Chargers that are being introduced on other state-supported routes across the country, we could probably cut the time to 2 hours.
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