North Carolina Intercity Rail Transit

[New Name]

The 7:30 Charlotte to Raleigh train has this annoying habit of blowing its horn the entire way out of the station now. It used to blow its horn just at road crossings (36th St, Craighead, Sugar Creek), but now it just lays on the horn and powers through all three intersections. 3,500 people DO NOT APPRECIATE this.

Edited April 7, 2010 by The Escapists

[vitaviatic]

The 7:30 Charlotte to Raleigh train has this annoying habit of blowing its horn the entire way out of the station now. It used to blow its horn just at road crossings (36th St, Craighead, Sugar Creek), but now it just lays on the horn and powers through all three intersections. 3,500 people DO NOT APPRECIATE this.

That is annoying, isn't it? The engineer should only be blowing for those xings, and in this specific format: --.-, or two long blows (a couple of seconds should do), one short blow (about a second or half second), and one more long blow. That is the only acceptable or even legal way to announce his crossing approach. Anything else, including blowing hard all the way through, is illegal. If it's the case of a malfunctioning horn (which does happen when flapper valves get stuck) they need to fix it. If the train is operating in a congested corridor with lots of, say, foot traffic to the side, then use of the bell would be a lot less aggravating, and just as effective. If it's just a grumpy old "hoghead" that enjoys irritating the hell out of people, s/he needs to be stopped.

I would suggest calling the Charlotte Amtrak office, and getting a phone number for the "Road Foreman of Engines" that covers that area. The RFE is that engineer's direct supervisor and that may be the fastest way to deal with it. If that doesn't work, you can log a complaint with the police of course, but be warned, local constabularies are rather inclined to run away from those complaints -- one, because of the difficulty of proof; and two, because the local DA's are usually outgunned by attorneys on the railroad's retainer (and for a small fine it becomes a wash under the "low hanging fruit theory").

Now since both the Carolinian and Piedmonts are state-sponsored trains, a complaint to the NCDOT might work. However, if all else fails, you can contact the Federal Railroad Administration here:

FRA Atlanta Regional Office

61 Forsyth Street, SW - Suite 16T20

Atlanta, GA 30303-3104

Phone - (404)562-3800

Fax - (404)562-3830

Hot Line - 1-800-724-5993

Good luck, and I hope things get quieter for you.

Edited April 8, 2010 by vitaviatic

[vitaviatic]

By the way...

If NCDOT is shopping for rolling stock, I've got a line on some good condition cars in storage here in Denver. They are Budds, similar to what is on the rails there now. They were in the fleet of Grand Luxe Tours (formerly known as American Orient Express), which was a charter train operation that was owned by the late Colorado Railcar (which by the way was essentially the designer of the DMUs that TTA was supposed to use).

The cars are, as far as I know, still in transportable (rolling) road shape. They've been sitting in UP's Burnham Yards in Denver for a little over a year now. There are a number of coaches in the pile, along with a dining car, a porter car (I think), and baggage cars. I'm sure they would need some interior restoration at this point, but minimal I would think. I'm just hoping someone gets them out of here before they become condos for rattlesnakes.

I can find the details of the receivership if anybody is interested, and I can do some minor, uncompensated legwork if desired (taking photos, for example). You know where to find me.

[vitaviatic]

^^^Re: Previous post...

The actual car count is 1 baggage car, 1 dome car (probably too high for NC clearances), and 19 coach/sleeper cars. I believe most of the inventory to be configured as sleepers (as it was in service for charters), but with minimal reconfiguration can be restored for coach service.

There are also some old Ski Train cars that apparently did not get shipped off with the demise of Denver's Ski Train last year. Don't know the legal/owner status of those, but I guarantee that those cars are in good shape. Will try to post pics later.

Edited April 17, 2010 by vitaviatic

[mallguy]

The NCDOT has a list of its rail equipment posted online. A dome car has been used on the Piedmont/Carolinian line. It's the Northeast Corridor that has clearance issues.

[mattm]

The NCDOT has a list of its rail equipment posted online. A dome car has been used on the Piedmont/Carolinian line. It's the Northeast Corridor that has clearance issues.

Unfortunately they had to retire the dome car. I believe the issue was that it could not be updated

to conform to modern safety standards (it was a while ago and the details have gone fuzzy).

-- Matt

[kermit]

The Gboro to Gboro commuter line study has been released:

http://www.ncrr.com/...rshipREPORT.pdf

Edited May 12, 2010 by kermit

[tozmervo]

I don't reckon NC keeps a good supply of spare locomotives around?

[rooster8]

Surely they have a spare, if not maybe NS could lend them one.

[ERJ170]

Surely they have a spare, if not maybe NS could lend them one.

Don't they have 5 locomotive? Raleigh, Asheville, Salisbury, Greensboro, and High Point. I'm pretty sure Greensboro and High Point (the 2 new from Go-Transit) are ready since the new service starts in just a couple of weeks. I believe they can do the 2 daily service with the 4 locomotives..

This is pretty dang sad though and I, for one, wish they would use this opportunity to ask the Fed Gov for funds to close off the rail line and make it a closed system. make overpasses or underpasses or close some of the roads all together. It would make for a much safer and quicker ride.. And I say make it close the entire length of the NCRR system. People will get upset for a minute, but they will get over it and move on..

I can imagine if the entire system is closed, you could probably run CLT-RDU is about 2.5 hours and run the entire line in under 5 including stops.. now that's very Eurocentric..

I may not be looked at as a good guy with my thoughts, but I whole heartedly believe it would do good for all parties involved..

[mallguy]

I may not be looked at as a good guy with my thoughts, but I whole heartedly believe it would do good for all parties involved..

I agree with you completely. Plus having a locomotive carrying around hundreds of gallons of diesel, as this accident shows, isn't always good idea- yet another plus for electrification.

[ChiefJoJo]

The Tier II Draft EIS for Raleigh to Richmond was released today. The public hearings have been scheduled along the corridor as well. Literally hundreds of pages of information, so have at it...

Public Hearing Schedule

Learn more about the project and provide your input at the Tier II DEIS public hearings!

Dates and locations for the public hearings are listed below.

“Open House” information sessions will be held from 5:00 – 7:00 p.m. followed by public hearings at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Tuesday

July 13, 2010 Warren County, NC

Northside Elementary School

164 Elementary Avenue, Norlina, NC 27563

Thursday

July 15, 2010 Brunswick and Mecklenburg Counties, VA

Southside Virginia Community College

Christanna Campus

109 Campus Drive, Alberta, VA 23821

Tuesday

July 20, 2010 Richmond, VA

Virginia DMV Cafeteria

2300 W. Broad Street, 1st floor

Richmond, VA 23269

Wednesday

July 21, 2010 Chesterfield County,

Colonial Heights, and Petersburg, VA

Union Station

103 River Street

Petersburg, VA 23804

Thursday

July 22, 2010 Dinwiddie County

Sunnyside Elementary School

10203 Sunnyside Road

McKenney, VA 23872

Monday

July 26, 2010 Wake County, NC

Raleigh Convention Center

500 South Salisbury Street

Raleigh NC 27601

Tuesday

July 27, 2010 Vance County, NC

Aycock Elementary School

305 Carey Chapel Road

Henderson, NC 27537

Thursday

July 29, 2010 Franklin County, NC

Franklinton High School Gym

6948 N. Cheatham Street,

Franklinton, NC 27525

[Gard]

There seems to be a bit of a disagreement among the state and City of Raleigh over which side of Capital Blvd. the tracks should be located....The state favors the CSX tracks on the left and the city prefers the Norfolk Southern tracks on the right. On the state's behalf, the CSX tracks would cost 44 million less to get it build, however, the city doesn't like this plan because it would effectively isolate the booming entertainment district (Glenwood South) from the rest of downtown and could kill off many of the supporting businesses that have cropped up around that area due to street crossings being closed. The Norfolk Southern would cost more to construct, but would close much fewer crossings and therefore, have less of an impact on the city overall.

http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/06/04/514230/tracks-might-divide-raleigh.html

[staffer]

There seems to be a bit of a disagreement among the state and City of Raleigh over which side of Capital Blvd. the tracks should be located....The state favors the CSX tracks on the left and the city prefers the Norfolk Southern tracks on the right. On the state's behalf, the CSX tracks would cost 44 million less to get it build, however, the city doesn't like this plan because it would effectively isolate the booming entertainment district (Glenwood South) from the rest of downtown and could kill off many of the supporting businesses that have cropped up around that area due to street crossings being closed. The Norfolk Southern would cost more to construct, but would close much fewer crossings and therefore, have less of an impact on the city overall.

http://www.newsobser...de-raleigh.html

actually, the NS alternative costs less to CONSTRUCT than the CSX alternative, but the total project cost is higher as the NS alternative requires more right of way acquisition from the CSX/NS interchange at Capitol Blvd and Whitaker Mill Road down to Hillsborough Street.

[vitaviatic]

Uh...Perhaps it can be buried underneath Downtown, er, excuse me, Capital Blvd. (Never liked that useless name change, by an even more useless mayor -- Avery Upchurch. But I digress... )

For all of the high-density projects that Raleigh claims to want to put downtown, the Boulevard will have to be upgraded anyhow to up the capacity, especially given that any serious commuter transit is still fifteen years out (more like twenty-five if history is any indication). Rebuild the Boulevard at the same time, with upgrades, and sink the the railroad within the ROW of the highway and you get: 1) more space to build, and; 2) funding from multiple pots (highway and transit).

OK, let's get real here for a minute. You can't possibly cram HSR into a skinny little single track corridor (on either side of Capital ). You're gonna need probably three tracks inbound from the north for staging purposes. You wanna talk about wrecking Glenwood South?! Try triple tracking through there. And if you intend to elevate multiple main lines, you might as well bury it, save some money, and get rid of the eyesore. For all intents and purposes, you're gonna have to bury it anyway to get a station with any kind of utility out of it at that puny little Wye.

Go ahead. Tell me it's expensive.

Why yes, it is! But it's cheaper in the long run to sink it now and avoid all the clutter problems with crossings and train delays later (which might actually, if bad enough, make the enterprise fail!). El Paso tunneled underneath their downtown all the way through. Reno didn't tunnel it, but they co-oped with Union Pacific to build a depressed trainway through downtown to free up Virginia St. and the other I-80 interchanges. The biggest hurdle and expense would be utility relocation, but I suspect that most of the utilities are set off to the side of Capital , and not directly underneath it. Not to mention that this would eliminate multiple condemnations and land acquisition expenses (the State already owns the Capital right-of-way.

There are a number of examples of this type of joint highway/transit venture that have done very well, both in the time and expense category (Denver's T-REX notable among them). LA is embarking on the same type thing with the "Subway to the Sea", after they've already been successful with the Alameda Corridor. The little corner of DTR that HSR will graze by is not that big of a deal to traverse (we're not talking about digging under the Legislature here). But so help me, if as usual, Raleigh tries to do it the nineteenth century (read: cheap) way, you will regret it, not just from denegration of the neighborhoods you just made interesting, but from the wasted hours spent pounding your steering wheel, or just as bad, waiting on a train that never moves because it either can't get in or out of the station.

Edited June 14, 2010 by vitaviatic

[orulz]

Vita, OK - I'll go ahead and tell you it's expensive. You seem to think that cost doesn't matter and PPP's and TIFs can build anything, but remember this is not 2007. The cost of rebuilding Capital as an attractive boulevard, plus the cost of rebuilding either the CSX or NS corridors (or both!) for high speed rail, is almost certainly much less than the cost of rebuilding Capital in a way that relocates one or both railroads into a tunnel in its median.

The three examples you cite, El Paso, Reno, and LA's Alameda Corridor are different. In El Paso and Reno, the tracks were at street level and running through downtown. Not sure about El Paso, but Reno used a tax assessment district (on downtown casinos and such) to fund construction. Now if we were talking about burying at-grade tracks through downtown Raleigh, such a scheme might work, but you'd need some pretty ridiculous assessments on land that is in a flood plain and not that valuable to begin with.

LA's Alameda corridor eliminated 200 grade crossings and was largely funded by revenues from the freight railroads that use it. This is a significant amount of revenue, because probably half the Chinese trinkets bought in the US come through Alameda on up to 150 trains per day.

As for train capacity - The CSX corridor could be quadruple-tracked north of Jones Street with property already owned by TTA. The NS corridor can be triple tracked without almost zero damage to Glenwood South, and quadruple tracked with some impacts but nothing devastating.

As you suggest, the EIS plans for the NS route call for triple tracking the corridor until just north of Peace Street. Then, a new two-track viaduct will extend from Peace to North on the sliver of land between the railroad and West. The damage from demolition of buildings would be limited to three one-story buildings in that sliver of land (two are uninteresting; one is kind of neat but I won't cry over its loss in the name of HSR.) The loss of those buildings could be more than compensated by building the viaduct to allow shops underneath it, as is so common in Europe and Japan (and even elsewhere in the US - Metra Market in Chicago comes to mind for one.) The viaduct could easily be made wide enough to accommodate a third and fourth track in the future without unreasonable impacts, provided the stores under the viaduct are built to accommodate it from the start.

The platforms themselves are already planned to be mostly below grade. Not in a tunnel, but below street level nonetheless. This is not because a huge trench will be dug, but because the railroad already happens to be below prevailing ground level between Hargett and Jones. I see no need to dig a tunnel when Raleigh's topography already serendipitously achieves pretty much the same effect.

To me, tunneling the tracks along Capital seems to be putting a billion-dollar, 24-carat gold, diamond-studded square peg into a round hole. If you want to talk about huge plans that would allow downtown to expand north along Capital Blvd, how about just consolidating all FRA train operations (freight, HSR, and commuter) onto one side of Capital or the other, in a big four-track corridor without trenching or elevating. Close the other side to FRA rail and run the LRT there instead. Relocate both the CSX and NS freight yards out of town (say, to Youngsville and Clayton respectively.) Use the yards on the FRA side for staging passenger trains, and sell off the yards on the LRT side for a huge master planned redevelopment. To me the NS side seems like it would be best for FRA and the CSX side for LRT, but pick your poison really.

[kermit]

I just returned from a ride on the midday Piedmont (from Raleigh to CLT). There were two things of note: First, the train was half full (which I thought was good for a service only running for a couple of weeks). Second, the refurbished 60s era coaches are very nice (lots of leg room) and are far better than the amfleet equipment on the Carolinian.

Lots of crossing work was also evident (both in Mebane and Back Creek Ch rd in Charlotte)

[Nindec]

Looks like the first installment of NC's ARRA rail money is coming in -- $20.3 million "to refurbish passenger coaches and locomotives."

https://apps.dot.state.nc.us/pio/releases/details.aspx?r=3824

Anyone know some more specifics on where this money is going? I'm assuming these train cars will be new additions to the fleet -- are they in preparation for the fourth Raleigh to Charlotte route, or will they supplement or replace cars on the current routes?

Either way, it's good to see some of that money start to flow.

Edited July 13, 2010 by Nindec

[New Name]

Can anyone help me confirm that NCRR has officially appropriated the money for the grade separation at Sugar Creek Rd. in Charlotte? I hear this is the case.

[Gard]

FYI the public meeting for the Raleigh/Wake County leg of the Raleigh-Richmond project is tonight at 5pm. The N&O has posted a map of the proposed road closings/bridges/underpasses:

http://media2.newsobserver.com/smedia/2010/07/26/10/train-map.source.prod_affiliate.156.pdf

[phil-king]

I have always supported building lines for high speed passenger trains connecting Raleigh and Charlotte to Richmond and the Northeast Corridor, but the Economist published an interesting article about the potential consequences new passenger lines. The article is largely concerned with the regulations and industry standards that might be imposed on freight lines as a consequence of congress developing new standards to for passenger lines. But, there are a laundry list of other economic concerns the article addresses in order to show that there are unexpected costs to building high speed intercity rail.

Economist: Consequences of passenger traffic on freight lines

[mallguy]

Thanks for the link- that article was fascinating, but I otherwise wouldn't have noticed it.

Major error in the article- Acela trains do NOT use track owned by freight railroads. The Northeast Corridor is owned mostly by Amtrak and somewhat by Metro-North. Similarly, Amtrak trains in NC use the NCRR, which is state-owned, for much of the trip in the state.

European freight railroads are generally a disaster, with low market shares and little, if any, profits- the reverse of US railroads.

[tozmervo]

If you provide it, they will ride it

"Ridership on trains between North Carolina’s two largest cities climbed from 5,258 in June 2009, to 15,426 in June 2010."

Read more: Raleigh-Charlotte train traffic jumps 200% - Triangle Business Journal

This is great news. I think it bodes well for the future of that route. I'm still hoping to hop it one weekend to check out Raleigh

[mallguy]

This is great news. I think it bodes well for the future of that route.

Agreed. Trains magazine had an article about the Capitol Corridor in California- as frequencies increased, ridership soared, and subsidies (perhaps overall, or perhaps per train; not sure) decreased, and as speeds on the route increased, it just became more cost-effective to run more trains (as equipment could be turned more times in a day with faster trips). I'm seeing the start of the same trend in NC, fortunately.

[kermit]

So I have been looking at this map for a few days: http://www.bytrain.org/quicklinks/pdf/nc_railmap_10.pdf and I keep getting drawn towards the O-line (I think) which connects Charlotte, Mooresville, Mocksville, Winston-Salem and Greensboro. The map makes it appear to be a straight shot between Charlotte and Winston. Can anyone here comment on the condition of the line north of Mooresville? Is this a route that could be used for commuter service at some point in the VERY distant future? (Winston always seems to get left out of NC passenger rail plans).

I do recognize the absurdity of my question (with the NCRR getting double tracked from CLT to Gboro) -- it just seems like an interesting (and from my perspective neglected) line.