This Thursday, the City of Durham will have a city council work session where they’ll ask its mayor to sign a formal request to NCDOT to make a timeline and cost estimates for an Amtrak (and in the distant-ish future, regional rail) station in RTP. We’ve known informally that this would be a thing since the commuter rail study (and it’s in our soon-to-be-adopted Destination 2055 regional wish list), but this would make NCDOT put money where its mouth is.
The Triangle West TPO’s slide deck talks about how funding for rail projects is made artificially difficult because of the process imposed by state law, but how we could still get the ball rolling.
After all, NCDOT itself provided slides on why this could be a good idea, as well as what sort of work may need to go into this. As a reminder, this is where it could be:
…and these are things to consider as for how to build and run the station:
Note: the City of Durham and Triangle West TPO (as opposed to Wake County or CAMPO) is working on this, since the Triangle Mobility Hub will be in the Durham County side of RTP. Still, obviously, this will have important downstream effects for downtown Raleigh, too, which would just be two stations over.