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 north of Raleigh. A lot of the more recent updates are procedural, but it’s still a nice update since the details have been lost from the media hype, as of late.
To clarify where we are: NCDOT got a $48M CRISI grant from Washington in 2020 to help buy the Raleigh-Norlina corridor from the freight rail giant CSX, and another $58M CRISI grant earlier this year to survey the land and do initial engineering work with Virginia. This helps us buy the land (but we are still working on pooling together the rest of the money needed, as well as closing the deal with CSX!) and do 30% of the necessary engineering work.
This is on top of several existing state-funded/federally-supported projects to eliminate railroad crossings between Raleigh and Wake Forest.
The federal DOT is also accepting applications for multi-year funding thanks to Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and NCDOT wants to take advantage of that to finish designing, then build rail upgrades between Raleigh and Wake Forest as a first phase of a fully upgraded higher-speed rail line between Raleigh and Norlina. Applications are due March 7, 2023. We’re not guaranteed to win this competitive grant, but getting that win would definitely help us bring in additional, faster rail service between Raleigh and Richmond by 2030 like the state wants.
On a very related note, communities along the S-line corridor have received two grants to help figure out how to encourage the areas around future stations to become more walkable and transit-supportive: a $900k grant in 2021, as well as a $3.4M RAISE grant this year. These, too, are being spearheaded by the state.