Raleigh Union Station and RUSbus Facility / Union West

The interstate right there is terrible, but at least the building was saved. The Birmingham, AL Terminal Station was demolished in the 1960s. One of the biggest losses in the country that many don’t know about imo. It was incredible. How Birmingham's iconic Terminal Station was lost to a wrecking ball in 1969 - al.com

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What a wonderful building. So many of those industrial heartland train stations are huge losses to architectural history.

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Took these Monday evening coming back from Philly.
Our train station is getting some of that fancy new moving stair technology!

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It would be super cool if they left all the machinery visible like that. Not exposed, of course, but behind glass.

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“I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.” – Mitch Hedberg

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I think the doors shows it’s blocked off.

This past Tuesday, Raleigh’s City Council held a work station where they, among other things, heard updates about NCDOT’s acquisition and upgrade of the S-line corridor.. Among other things (see this post for updates about the rest of the Raleigh-Richmond portion of the S-line), we got a first look at what a RUS expansion may look like.

The first thing you may notice is how the path to the northern platform looks so funky. I assume that has to do with terrain limitations plus how there’s as little amounts of track being closed as possible for construction, but we won’t know for sure until we see more detailed site plans and land survey results -and we probably won’t see that until the S-line project gets further in design.

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Total assumption here – but this looks like a new S-Line platform would close Morgan Street (at least to vehicular traffic). That would suck for folks in Boylan Heights. Now, if West Street Extension could happen, I’d make that trade all day long.

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Morgan is a bridge, is it not? I imagine the platform would just sit underneath it.

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Why would you need to close Morgan St.? It’s a bridge, and it already spans the entire length between Glenwood Av. and the eastern edge of the rail right-of-way. I can’t imagine NCRR would want to do anything so drastic with the station design so that they’d have to redo that bridge as well.

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Assuming they meant Hargett

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Yep, Hargett. Sorry. That is currently a very useful road.

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Yes, that’s been the plan for a while now, but I’m with you in not liking it at all…

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While I do understand the engineering requirements of these projects, the non-connecting or sprawling-out if you will, really is getting out of hand, IMO

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The platform improvements alone will cost $200 million. I’m kidding but also I’m not

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I agree, but that has also always been the plan. This is the sheet drawing from NCDOT (via TBJ’s 2017 article about RUS’ construction progress); notice that, to the north of the current concourse, there’s a pathway that follows the curve of the S-line tracks (the text for this version of the image is blurry, but it’s labeled “Future Concourse”). That is the exact same place as the space set aside for the concept outlined in the slide deck:

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I hate the long concourse for the existing platform and this one looks like it is more than twice as long. Yuck.

Get rid of the Boylan diamond crossing and then do this:

The platform is further frorm downtown, but ironically, it’s a shorter walk from the platform to downtown compared with this SEHSR platform, and no longer than on the existing H-line platform.

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Not a fan of this setup. Maybe one day we can have a completely straight mostly underground station.

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I uhhhhh don’t think so… at least not in any of our lifetimes. This is the big multimodal transit station Raleigh has been building to for decades, so it just is what it is at this point. This will be the train station for generations to come…

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The original 2004-era monograph (which followed the 2002-era Tier 1 EIS identifying the S-line via Raleigh as the route for SEHSR) correctly picked the spot west of the wye as the best spot for a station.

This would require removal of NS’s diamond. There was a plan that would have preserved their access and an equal ability to run trains, but unfortunately they declined to play ball. So, as frequently happens in US railroad planning, a promising notion was quickly quashed due to freight RR intransigence.

Much has happenend since 2004, not the least of which is a massive decline in traffic at Glenwood Yard and NS’s lease of their lines to CLNA and RFCC. I think it might be worth revisiting.

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