Could it be that there is life in passenger rail in the Old Dominion after all? Such could be the good news now that the Commonwealth Transportation Board has agreed to spend $25.2 million over the next three years to add two new passenger trains from Washington — one to Richmond and the other to Lynchburg.
The board wants to see how ridership goes. Lynchburg already has one daily train, descendant of the famed Crescent which raced from D.C. to New Orleans. The Lynchburg route starts in October and another extra will go from Richmond to D.C. in December.
Hats off to Norfolk Southern for agreeing to put up 30 percent of the $41.5 million cost to improve both passenger and rail service in Lynchburg which is easing the deal. Now if CSX will improve its north-south artery through Richmond and clean up chronic delays at the Acca Yard, the Old Dominion could really be high-balling along.
Suddenly, there finally seems to be movement on passenger rail. A little more than 15 months ago, I quoted Norfolk Southern CEO Charles W. Moorman as saying that the cold reality was that the the political will didn’t exist to boost passenger rail. Freight carriers like NS and CSX must tend to their principal responsibilities of improving shareholder value and they do that by providing good freight service. Only Amtrak offers national passenger routes.
I got fried for running Moorman’s comments as BR’s intrepid readers thought I was dissing passenger rail. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Anyone who knows me well realizes that I am a “foamer” or an individual so enamoured with choo-choos that I start foaming at the mouth when I hear the mournful horn of a diesel. When I had a basement I had a sizeable HO layout and long to rebuild one.
How to explain the turnaround on rail? Part of it comes from Barack Obama’s push for massive infrastructure improvements and the federal and state spending to pull it off. He’s got my vote on this. America’s and Virginia’s rail, port, highway, water and sewer and electrical systems badly need upgrades. The last time the U.S. launched any serious major infrastructure project was the 1950s when Dwight Eisenhower started Interstates.
Broadband also needs to reach out to rural parts of the state since big-time carriers like Comcast tend to wire up wealthier middle class neighborhoods and suburbs first because they can bundle Net, digital TV and digital phone service into one expensive and profitable package. Poor rural and inner city folk may need broadband to start up a business, but they can’t spend upwards of $200 a month buying Starz, TMC and ESPN, too. Maybe some relief is on the way.
The rising popularity of infrastructure improvements is based in part on getting out of the recession but it is suddenly in vogue and that is breaking some political barriers to thinking about the possibilities of rail. The shift in thinking is becoming evident as “pay as you go” and “public private partnership” ideas so popular since the 1990s with neo-cons and other conservatives suddenly seem so yesterday and so limited. They might be fine for a small stretch of superhighway or a bridge (entailing lots of patterns of human settlement issues well known on BR) but they can’t really do much to bring on rail and all of its benefits.
And, you have to wonder just how these deals are funded and how much the foreign highway operators back in Sydney or Barcelona can raise tolls to meet their debt obligations. Unless the Australians and Spaniards who often run such public-private projects are geniuses at financial planning — and the current crisis has shown that very few are — Average Joes commuting by car to work are just going to avoid their highways and bridges if they jack up the prices too much. Then, they go bust, dashing hopes that private enterprise and not government is the salvation for everyone and everything.
Rail is a perfect alternative to a lot of these problems. Improvements require massive amounts of money but the rail fares will be cheap and the trips less polluting. To be sure, the steps so far are tiny and they will require public funding.
Virginia has a great tradition of railroading and some of the first ever roads went through the Old Dominion. The Confederacy was saved for a while by the old Wilmington and Weldon that ran war supplies to Richmond from blockade runners docking in the Cape Fear, N.C. area. Famous passenger trains include the Chesapeake & Ohio’s “George Washington” that ran from Newport News and D.C. to points West, Norfolk & Western’s bullet-nosed “Powhatan Arrow” and, of course, Southern Railways’ “Southern Crescent.”
Could trains like that ever come back? One can only dream.
Peter Galuszka
