(The following story by Peter Bacque appeared on the Richmond Times-Dispatch website on September 28.)
RICHMOND, Va. — Train service at Main Street Station is a work in progress.
And the work is going slowly.
Richmond reopened the railroad station in Shockoe Bottom in 2003 after a $51.6 million renovation of the handsome Beaux Arts building.
First opened in 1901, the nearly 20,000-square foot National Historic Landmark holds its clock tower high over traffic on Interstate 95, as it curves around Richmond’s signature structure.
Last year, about 13,000 passengers got on or off Amtrak passenger trains at Main Street. By contrast, 235,000 travelers passed through Amtrak’s Staples Mill station, about 8 miles to the northwest in Henrico County, last year.
Despite the city’s and the state’s enthusiasm for Main Street Station, “about a quarter-million Richmond-area rail passengers . . . vote otherwise each year by boarding and alighting at Staples Mill,” said Richard L. Beadles, a member of the state’s Rail Advisory Board and former president of the RF&P Railroad.
“This is not to fault the beautiful building,” Beadles said. “It’s about the inadequate rail service” at Main Street.
While the ornate building brought in about $478,000 last year in rent from the RightMinds marketing firm, special events and parking, the city still had to spend $382,000 to cover the cost of running Main Street Station in 2007.
Chronically underfunded Amtrak pays no rent for using the station and does not have personnel there or provide baggage service there. Travelers can buy tickets from self-service ticketing kiosks. Snacks come from machines. Electronic displays announce train schedules and a security guard helps usher passengers to the train platform. Taxis don’t commonly wait at the station.
An employee of the Richmond Metropolitan Authority, which manages the historic station for the city, is stationed in the building and helps with traveler information at the lobby reception desk.
The Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation will unveil its statewide plan to pay for making billions of dollars in improvements in rail service — including Main Street Station’s — this week.
Staples Mill is served by 16 Amtrak trains — eight round trips — a day, while Main Street Station only sees four — two roundtrip — trains daily.
“Main Street Station is what I call a transportation center that’s still under development,” said Kevin B. Page, the state’s chief of rail transportation.
But, Page said, “It’s a good start.”
. . .
Main Street Station has gotten mixed reviews from Amtrak passengers who use it.
“It’s beautiful,” said Deepa Sanyal, an urban planner from Washington and a frequent Amtrak traveler, as she waited before a business appointment at the restored station recently. “It’s a great entrée for anyone coming into Richmond.”
The building’s interior is elegant in glazed brick, painted in shades of white and pale gold and green and tan, its walls adorned with paintings of Richmond and railroading, and proud memorials to its resurrection.
Palms wave in the upstairs lobby, dotted with marble café tables, and ceilings sparkle with stars. Off to one side, a parlor is comfortable with couches and chairs.
Julia Ritt of Varina made sure to book tickets from the Richmond station on a trip to Washington with her two young grandsons “because it’s history — we wanted the kids to leave from here.”
But John W. Cross ran into a problem when he rode Amtrak to Main Street in June to do some genealogical research at the Library of Virginia, about seven-tenths of a mile away — and uphill from the station.
“My original intention was to hail a cab,” the Alexandria man said, “but they don’t seem to cruise around Richmond like they do around Washington.”
So, Cross said, “I walked.”
“A sign to say how to get a cab,” he said, “that would have been a big improvement for me.”
Corellia Hudgson, of Petersburg, had another idea as she stood on the platform at Main Street Station while waiting to board a Connecticut-bound train.
“They should open up a little café. It would probably get more people.”
. . .
The idea of a transportation hub based at Main Street Station, however, is “based more in idealism than reality,” said George Hoffer, a Virginia Commonwealth University transportation economist and a passenger rail advocate. “The first and most important reason is that Main Street Station is not on the main [north-south Amtrak rail] line.”
“The only trains that go through there right now are trains that go on to Newport News,” said Ross B. Capon, executive director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers in Washington.
Additional trains connecting to the Southeast, said Amtrak spokeswoman Karina Romero, can’t get to the station because there’s no stretch of rail suitable on which bring them in.
Main Street Station also is handicapped by the bottleneck of the Acca freight rail yard — near I-95’s and Interstate 64’s interchange at Bryan Park — that slows trains between Main Street and Staples Mill, where they hook up with the main line.
The state is confident, however, that Main Street will become a busy transportation hub and a focus for downtown economic development through an ambitious $1.2 billion group of long-term rail improvements to the “urban crescent” from Washington through the station to Newport News over the next two decades.
And running more trains along that route will come at a price: Each train would cost about $1.7 million a year to operate, Amtrak said.
The state rail agency’s plan for what it terms the Urban Crescent Express and Passenger Rail Corridor would include bringing more trains into Main Street.
“Those 44 to 59 riders you see a day out of Main Street Station are going to dynamically change when we implement phase one . . . ,” Page said.
If Virginia’s proposed rail plan is put into effect, the state anticipates that annual ridership at Main Street Station could more than triple last year’s numbers by 2015, climbing to 41,800 passengers, and grow nearly fivefold, to as much as 59,600 passengers, by 2020, according to Jennifer Pickett with the Department of Rail and Public Transportation.
Increasing fuel prices have swelled intercity train usage this year nationally and in Virginia. Main Street Station’s passenger traffic is already up by almost 40 percent this year compared to 2007’s figures.
. . .
Paying for rail improvements is expensive and usually difficult.
Virginia estimates that the financial needs for the state’s passenger and freight rail transportation system now exceed $4.9 billion, while the state expects to have only about $1.3 billion in rail funds available through 2035 to pay for them.
And the federal government has allocated just $30 million for rail infrastructure work across the whole country this year. “And that’s a one-year program, a very de minimus program,” said Matthew O. Tucker, director of the state’s Department of Rail and Public Transportation.
Last year, Amtrak, the national rail passenger corporation, earned $2.15 billion in total revenue, but incurred $3.18 billion in expenses. The federal government made up the difference between Amtrak’s’ earnings and its expenses.
Since its inception, the Main Street Station project has cost $60.7 million in the effort to turn the station into a multimodal transportation center and made other improvements around the historic station.
Only $110,000 of the $60.7 million in the Main Street Station project has come from the city, explained city spokesman Linwood Norman. The federal government has picked up 80 percent of the cost, with the remainder coming from the state.
“I don’t think it goes unnoticed by anybody that we’re experiencing a downtown of the economy, that transportation funding is becoming harder for us all to acquire to do projects,” Tucker said.
As a result, Tucker said, “the basis of the rail plan is sharing costs and benefits” in public-private partnerships.
“I can’t imagine the capital of Virginia having the Main Street Station,” Tucker said, “and not having a way to make Main Street a very viable station.”
Freight-rail company CSX Transportation owns the rails the Amtrak trains run on and will contribute to the expansion where there’s a benefit to the company, said Jay Westbrook, CSX’s assistant vice president for public-private partnerships.
“We’re allowing the use of our unique corridor for expansion of our rail infrastructure to benefit the passenger services of the commonwealth,” Westbrook said. “We would not undertake these improvements for our freight service.”
GRTC Transit System, the regional bus company, is going ahead with its plan to locate a multimillion-dollar bus-transfer center at Main Street Station and wants to go to the federal government next year to get funding.
The bus company expects that its transfer center will serve about 12,000 of its riders, who now have to make their bus transfers at 30-plus street-corner locations around the city, said John M. Lewis Jr., GRTC’s chief executive officer.
Complicating Main Street Station’s future, Metro Richmond’s mass transportation operations are run by independent bodies and physically dispersed across the region.
Neither Amtrak nor Greyhound Bus Lines, however, have indicated willingness to shift their present Richmond-area operations to downtown.
Said Greyhound spokeswoman Abby Wambaugh, “We felt that our current location is better suited in location and size to better serve the local community.”
“Amtrak’s Staples Mill Station remains an important regional link to passenger rail travelers,” said Amtrak’s Romero, “and we have no plans to see suburban Richmond and Henrico County’s prominence diminished in our network.”
Nonetheless, Main Street Station “is an important project for our region,” said Daniel N. Lysy, the Richmond Regional Planning District Commission’s transportation director.
“We would view it as part of the downtown infrastructure,” Lysy said, “providing access from downtown Richmond for other areas outside our region.”
In that sense, Lysy said, Main Street Station is a development magnet, like the Greater Richmond Convention Center.
“The added thing we like is there’s the potential to have a first-class visitors center there, right downtown, centrally located in a beautiful historic area,” said Robert L. Bradham, the Greater Richmond Chamber’s senior vice president for business development and government affairs.
“Giving yourself the potential to have those things,” Bradham said, “I don’t think is wasting money.”