(The following story by Bruce Siceloff appeared on the News & Observer website on July 20, 2010.)
RALEIGH, N.C. — You get history by the earful when you ride around Raleigh with railroaders. And a little prehistory, too.
“See how the Norfolk Southern corridor hugs the edge of the old river bed through here,” said Allan Paul, rail operations director for the state Department of Transportation.
He stood in the Fairview Road rail crossing and pointed south along a kudzu-clad bank that separates tracks below from shady stub-end streets above, in Raleigh’s handsome old Glenwood Brooklyn neighborhood.
We nodded our heads, tentatively.
Yes, we see. What river bed?
“There was a river through here many millions of years ago,” he said. “It dried up and is today Pigeon House Creek.”
Paul was a tour guide for members of a task force that will advise the Raleigh City Council on a planned multimodal depot for fast intercity trains and beefed-up transit service.
As Raleigh considers historic upgrades for a rail network that has been shoehorned into the downtown grid since the 19th century, the city faces a mix of modern and recycled challenges.
Passenger trains thrived in Raleigh in the early 20th century. In 1942, Raleigh’s depot was inadequate for the hugely popular Streamliner, which pulled 20 coaches from New York to Florida. A forerunner of CSX was impatient for the city to build a bigger station.
“Seaboard Air Line got fed up with the city of Raleigh not being able to decide where its new rail station was going to go,” Paul said. “Does this sound familiar?”
Seaboard built its own depot, now home to a garden center, Logan Trading Co. Flowering plants sit on a passenger platform that was built 1,600 feet long – even longer than the 1,200-foot platform planned for the new Union Station on Hargett Street.
Today there are parallel plans for squeezing more tracks into downtown Raleigh, to serve different kinds of travelers in one of the nation’s fastest-growing regions.
A Triangle Transit network would probably use electric light-rail trains that could travel on tracks parallel to existing heavy-rail tracks or, like old trolleys, could run on tracks down Morgan and Harrington streets. Diesel locomotives would pull high-speed Amtrak trains for intercity travelers and rush-hour commuter trains for local workers and students.
Several modes of rail
They would share a narrow corridor with increasingly busy freight trains, on tracks that slip over and under Raleigh’s busiest streets – scarcely noticed by city residents.
“Food, lumber, recycled oil, you guys would be amazed at the stuff these railroads bring into Raleigh,” Paul said.
He said CSX plans to double the capacity of its mile-long freight yard on the opposite shore of that ancient river, east of Capital Boulevard.
And on the west side of Capital, Norfolk Southern’s freight yard has seen a 20 percent increase in traffic this year, said Durwood Laughinghouse, the railroad’s North Carolina vice president.
As Paul and Laughinghouse explained Norfolk Southern operations, a train rumbled into the yard with phosphates, ethanol, building products and open hoppers of cement. Four refrigerated railcars were parked nearby, packed with McDonald’s french fries.
“They have to be delivered on time, and they have to be watched on the refrigeration to make sure the french fries stay frozen,” Laughinghouse said. “They come here from Idaho and Washington, and it’s a very delicate operation.”
We don’t see the fries and phosphates, but these freight trains matter to motorists.
“For every one of Durwood’s hoppers out here, he’s taking eight trucks off the road,” Paul said. “If these materials had to travel [the entire distance] to merchants and residents via truck, you would have all sorts of added congestion on our roads.”
The railroad plans now moving forward will bring more benefits to the city, he said.
“At the end of the day when you’ve got construction finished, you’ll have a much better rail network through town that has even less impact on the community, with less noise and less obstruction at intersections.”