Good potential for the Raleigh to Richmond link?
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article250358946.html
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Yes, NCDOT and VDOT are in a very good situation to receive grant funding for S-Line work, having laid the all the groundwork for just such an opportunity – including, most notably, gaining control over the right of way. This puts it very high on the “shovel-readiness” scale that USDOT uses.
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As much as we talk a ton about the Raleigh-Richmond rail segment on this thread, getting the infrastructure and politics to the north of that is just as important if you want high(er) speed rail in Raleigh to be successful. Thankfully, the Virginia DOT took a major step in that direction: they closed a deal with CSX for permanent land easement in the rail corridor between Petersburg and DC!
To be clear, the deal does not mean the state of Virginia now owns the northern part of the Southeast Corridor. However, it does give it rights to easement, or the right to enter or use land someone else (CSX) owns. In this case, it means Virginia can now use this CSX corridor to build additional tracks to separate freight and passenger traffic (which will be super helpful for running fast, frequent, and reliable trains between DC and the Triangle)!
This is a part of their larger plan to, among other things, publicly own or operate the railroad tracks between DC and North Carolina. There’s two more phases in the CSX-VDOT shopping spree negotiations, including the abandoned right-of-way from Petersburg to the NC state border. CSX expects to close on those remaining deals in the next two years.
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A preferred corridor has been chosen for Atlanta- to-Charlotte high speed rail. It is the Greenfield Corridor Alternative.
Does anyone know why the preferred route has what looks like a very out of the way detour at the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport?
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I think the awkward airport detour is because they wanted to be able to serve the Greenville/Spartanburg area. Unlike the other alternatives they looked at, the “greenfield alternative” lets GDOT get away with just one stop for that metro(?) area:
With that said, though, I don’t think Greenville/Spartanburg are big enough that it can sustain a major transit hub built 20 miles away from either city. Plus, it’ll directly serve a primary airport -meaning it could help the HSR service be more competitive with airlines (and help us lower emissions) by augmenting or replacing regional flights in South Carolina.
You can read through Georgia’s thought process behind the study in the alternatives analysis chapter of the EIS if you got time.
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My guess is they decided to have a single station serving both Greenville and Spartanburg, in the middle where the airport is. It’s a bit of a head scratcher. It would be like putting a station out by RDU, instead of either downtown Raleigh and Durham.
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Also the land is less mountainous and only moderately developed in that corridor. So lower costs of acquisition and construction.
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Interesting that the map has Georgia MMPT on it. Thought that project has been dead for at least 15 years.
Also I wonder how they got to this route. If it were me, after Athens I’d get back up to along I-85 and capture that population base through SC. Also I would have tried to get Gainesville but they do have Amtrak. Which thinking now, that’s maybe with they avoided the I-85 corridor for the most part because it is served.
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Transit Twitter has been blowing up over this. I believe they’re operating off of two assumptions here:
- Trying to run an electrified high speed rail corridor through downtown Greenville and/or Spartanburg is going to be insanely expensive and tedious (ROW acquisition would be a nightmare).
- Most people would in the Greenville-Spartanburg area would probably drive to an HSR station anyway.
It’s kind of a shame, especially with how walkable downtown Greenville is, but I get it. Their main target in that particular market is probably folks who would otherwise drive all the way to Atlanta or Charlotte, so I suppose this at least puts a dent in the VMT for those trips.
Ultimately, the target for this route is the CLT-ATL market, and with both of those stations being located in downtown (or uptown, insert eye roll) and speeds going up to 220mph, they will easily pull from both airlines and the I-85 crowd. A direct flight between the two cities is about an hour and fifteen minutes, but when you factor in driving to the airport, dealing with TSA, and so on, HSR becomes the fastest, easiest option on this corridor. Here’s what they’re looking at for end-to-end time on all three alternatives (page 37 of the doc @keita linked):
The ranges for this chart are diesel vs electrified. Looks like flying would clearly beat the Southern Crescent alternative and be pretty competitive with the I-85 alternative, but an electrified Greenfield corridor wins every time. Even the diesel option wins when you consider how much of a hassle flying can be sometimes.
I hate seeing downtown Greenville and downtown Spartanburg skipped like this, but ultimately, it seems to be the most feasible and competitive option.
Edit: scrolled down a bit more… check out the cost comparison.
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I thought the MMPT was just an unfunded pipe dream, too, but it doesn’t seem like it was ever officially killed off? Even the developers of what’s now Centennial Yard still say they’re down for it in the future.
(Also, it’s probably on the EIS since this study started all the way back in 2013, so GDOT couldn’t just change their assumptions mid-study.)
Maybe it’s just a pipe dream for the future (since this rail service probably wouldn’t be built until the late 2030s at least, right?), but maybe Norfolk Southern could be convinced to allow some through-line services to Greenville? There’s a spur to the BMW plant right next to the airport, as you can see from OpenRailwayMap:
Maybe that could be leveraged so that there could be high-speed rail service that goes by the airport and terminates downtown?
Obviously, we won’t know whether this is possible (or even on the table) until the Phase 2 EIS is underway. But maybe now’s a good time to start thinking about it, and for their local MPO to start thinking about it.
Yeah! I’m surprised this isn’t the first thing people are talking about. Now that American trains don’t have to be bank vaults on wheels (unlike when this study started), I wonder if the Tier 2 EIS will have an even better cost profile?
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The Atlanta-Charlotte corridor is not unlike the Charlotte to Raleigh corridor.
If we’re shooting for 220mph, it would probably be much cheaper and easier to build a greenfield line that bypasses Greensboro entirely. The amount of sprawl along the I-85 crescent is extreme. Whereas, there is plenty of relatively cheap rural land available on a straight-line route from Raleigh to Charlotte. It’s also about 25 miles shorter.
Greensboro should not be ignored, however; to be clear, I see upgrading the NCRR to ~125mph and electrifying it as a higher priority for NC, but a straight line route should be in the plans as well.
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SC has never given passenger rail any consideration. I’m not surprised that the route around
Greenville-Spartanburg is unfavorable.
I can’t argue with the Greenfield route for Atlanta-Charlotte, but going Greenfield makes the project so expensive that I doubt it will be built for another 30 years. Raleigh-Richmond is almost shovel-ready by comparison.
As for a new passenger station in Atlanta, I’m skeptical. I used to live there. The City and GDOT have had numerous false starts.
As for direct Charlotte-Raleigh at true high speed with electrification, it could be done along the “original Norfolk Southern” route via Norwood, Troy, Robbins, and Gulf. The route is unpopulated, which is good in the sense that ROW acquisition expense would be minimal but bad in the sense that the route would depend completely on Charlotte-Raleigh passengers. Given the political reality at the General Assembly, I have a hard time imagining the direct route would ever be chosen.
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If you believe the numbers @colbyjd3 posted earlier, that’s not necessarily true; the I-85 corridor is still more expensive to build. Besides, pre-construction costs should be similar for all corridors since all of them have to go through the same environmental/engineering studies anyways, and there’s no reason one would take longer to complete than the other.
Funding by the General Assembly’s one thing, but I think Norfolk Southern would be just as much of a roadblock; the Piedmont corridor we have now is at least owned by NCRR, but a direct Charlotte-Raleigh route doesn’t even have that going for them. There’s also potential ridership struggles from Durham not being on a direct path, too.
I agree with @orulz that a direct route could be nice in the long run. …but even just electrifying and speeding up the ROW we have now should do wonders for (inter)regional rail, and even that is hard to do with the politics and resources we have now. Maybe we should work on that first, and try to cultivate a better culture where the average person takes rail more seriously?
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Obviously higher speed rail via Greensboro comes first, but there is a hard limit to how fast you can go while still mostly sticking to the NCRR corridor.
Norfolk Southern requires a 90mph max for tracks shared with freight and passenger trains, which frankly makes sense. While there is no such requirement related to speeds if dedicated tracks are built in the corridor, there are enough curves and enough development along most of the corridor that getting past 125mph will be difficult. Not saying it can’t be done; it’s just a matter of cost and impacts, because the faster it goes, the more it has to deviate from the existing right of way.
I’m of the opinion that a nearly pure greenfield route would probably be easier, cheaper, and better.
The “Old NS” (ACWR) route is a possibility, but it’s surprisingly curvy as it was built cheaply from the start, and, unlike the NCRR, was basically never subsequently straightened, upgraded, or modernized in any way. It is today, very much as it was when it was built over 100 years ago, only far more run-down.
In contrast, the NCRR, especially between Greensboro and Charlotte, was probably a better alignment from the outset, and has seen a decent amount of ongoing maintenance, modernization, and upgrades - from signalization, to curve realignments, to double tracking - from its days as the Southern RR mainline, through Southern’s merger into NS, and now in this era of increased stewardship by the state of NC. But (perhaps because of the above!) it is now largely hemmed in by development. There’s enough sprawl spread out over nearly the entire corridor that the sort of upgrades required to get a true HSR line would likely be prohibitive in terms of impacts and costs.
The main exceptions to this almost-complete greenfield alignment would be, as with ATL-CLT, on the approaches to the cities at either end. Following the S-line through Apex and Cary would yield a good approach into Raleigh from that direction. Likewise, the ACWR could be one alternative for the approach to Charlotte; branching off from the NCRR somewhere between Harrisburg and Concord would seem to be the other.
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I believe 90 mph is as good as can be hoped for, on the existing NCRR corridor. Maybe there is still some low-hanging fruit in terms of curve straightening, but otherwise “it is what it is”. Much of the NCRR corridor is limited to speeds less than 79 today, so raising the maximum authorized speed from 79 to 90 won’t result in a huge difference in schedule.
Throwing a billion dollars into the NCRR corridor to run at 125 with electric (or even 110 with diesel) would beg the question of whether spending the same billion on a direct Charlotte-Raleigh electrified route through the middle of nowhere would be a better idea… especially if Atlanta-Charlotte goes electrified. Then you’d have the question of electrifying Raleigh-Richmond too.
I wasn’t suggesting that the original NS ROW be used as-is, but it’s representative of how a direct route could be carved out of the relatively undeveloped portion of central NC.
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I think a direct 220mph route from Raleigh to Charlotte would cost well north of a billion dollars. Probably more like $10 billion. Even Spain couldn’t build that for a $billion.
In contrast, my estimate for upgrading the NCRR to allow hourly service with 2 hour journey times from Raleigh to Charlotte via Greensboro, including electrification and some segments of dedicated passenger tracks to allow for higher-speed operation, would be more like a $3-5 billion project.
If you look at NCDOT’s service development plan that they submitted as part of their 2009 ARRA stimulus application, they do have quite a few major curve realignments under consideration. Take the segment between Burlington and Durham. While the text of the plan only specifically mentions future speeds up to 90mph, the degree of curvature shown on the schematics could actually allow for speeds more like 110mph or more for most of the route between Durham and Burlington - if a passenger-only track were included.
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Interesting document—this map seems to show a future phase of the SEHSR as a direct route between Raleigh and Charlotte:
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I think this is in a similar class of plans as the plans I have for my lottery winnings
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What happened to Wilmington…? 
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Apparently, the trains will stop in Castle Hayne.
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