(The following column by Dan Casey appeared on the Roanoke Times website on July 6, 2010.)
ROANOKE, Va. — Richard White is a health care industry consultant who lives in Southwest Roanoke County and spends about half of each week in Washington, D.C.
Radford resident Peggy Lester owns and runs laundromats and a car wash with her husband. She takes an annual trip with her girlfriend, Sandy Davis.
Jim and Mary Lou Lewis live in Blue Ridge. He’s retired from Norfolk Southern Corp. and is a Major League Baseball fan. She likes to listen to music by James Taylor and Carole King.
On June 22, one thing they all had in common was their choice of transportation.
All found themselves on the Northeast Regional, an Amtrak train that (since October) originates in Lynchburg and serves the nation’s capital, New York City, Boston and points in between.
It’s one of two trains that make two daily stops in Lynchburg. The other is the Crescent, which originates in Florida and stops in Lynchburg about 6 a.m.
The Crescent is frequently sold out because of all the passengers it picks up heading north, and tickets cost a lot more because the service isn’t subsidized by Virginia taxpayers.
I was on the Northeast Regional, too, along with photographer Eric Brady and my 11-year-old son, Zach, who had never ridden a train.
A buzz is growing about this relatively new, inexpensive and convenient way to travel to urban areas in the Northeast.
Tickets to Washington purchased two weeks in advance are $29 each way.
We thought we’d see what all the fuss is about, and look into whether that train might be extended to Roanoke anytime soon.
The Northeast Regional leaves Lynchburg’s Kemper Street Station each weekday morning at 7:38 a.m., and at 9:59 a.m. on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays.
The trip to Union Station in Washington takes about 3 12 hours. We arrived there just a little after 11 a.m.
It leaves Union Station at 4:50 p.m. Sundays and weekdays and at 4 p.m on Saturdays. The trip back is also supposed to take 3 12 hours. Ours took 4 12 because the train left about 25 minutes late and we got stuck behind some evening commuter trains.
More comfortable
If you’ve been on a coach flight recently, you’re well aware of flying’s growing hassles.
Security precautions instituted since 9/11 require you to show up at least an hour prior to any flight, and at the least you have to remove your shoes to get on the plane.
You’ll be lucky to leave the airport on time, and to not miss connecting flights. And in case you hadn’t noticed, the airlines seem to be squeezing more and more seats into their cabins, and charging passengers for luggage.
The upshot of all that is, flying coach these days is about as comfortable as riding a Greyhound bus, but a lot more costly and less convenient.
By contrast, the cheap seats on the Northeast Regional are about as roomy as flying first-class, and the business class seats are even roomier.
There’s no luggage fee or onerous security checkpoints, and no half-hour or longer expensive taxi or shuttle ride to your ultimate destination.
Riders who like it
On the train that morning were the Lewises.
They were taking a midweek trip for two reasons: He wanted to see a Washington Nationals game. She wanted to see a James Taylor-Carole King concert.
They would stay at a hotel around the corner from Union Station, and had agreed to accompany each other to those successive-night events.
Also aboard the train were Paul and Gayle Kennedy from Troutville, heading off on a four-day sightseeing trip, “seeing where the sausage is made and seeing the Smithsonian,” he said.
Their Washington hotel was a couple of blocks from the station. They took the train rather than driving “because we don’t like to go through all the traffic,” she said.
“We like to walk — we’re big walkers,” he said. “It’s a great place for that.”
Returning that evening in a business-class car, I met Richard White, the health care consultant from Roanoke County.
He spends two or three days each week in Washington. He’s been riding the train almost twice weekly since November.
On the train, “I can work,” White noted. “I’ve got a laptop, and a wireless card. I don’t have to drive. I don’t have to fight I-81, which I was doing for years.
“Flying’s a whole other story, although I used to do it,” he added. “It’s just so much more unreliable.”
The good news
The good news is that lots of people like White, the Lewises and the Kennedys have been discovering the Northeast Regional.
When it launched as a state-subsidized, three-year pilot project Oct. 1, the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation conservatively estimated that adding another train connecting Lynchburg to points north would draw about 51,000 riders in its first year.
Instead, the Northeast Regional had 55,000 riders in its first six months, said Jennifer Pickett, the chief of policy and communications for the Department of Rail and Public Transportation.
“We added a train at the right place and the right time,” she said.
By the end of April (the most recent month for which data is available) nearly 67,000 passengers had used the new service.
That works out to an average of slightly more than 11,000 riders per month. If that level of ridership holds through the end of September, about 132,000 passengers will have ridden the train in its first year.
Before the pilot project launched, the projected taxpayer subsidy was almost $3 million.
But because ticket sales have gone so well, “our direct costs are going to be less than that,” Pickett said.
The bad news
Many of the Roanoke-area passengers I met on the train wished aloud they didn’t have to drive to Lynchburg to catch the train.
That trip takes an hour from downtown. Though parking at Kemper Street Station is free, the station isn’t easy to find for anybody unfamiliar with the Hill City.
“It’d be a lot better if the train came through Roanoke,” Jim Lewis told me.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be on the immediate horizon.
Later this month, the Department of Rail and Public Transportation is adding new Amtrak service from Washington to suburban Richmond, and it’s considering extending that train to Norfolk in three years.
At that point, Roanoke will be the only major Virginia city without passenger train service. That isn’t slated until 2015 at the earliest, if it happens at all. And there are significant hurdles to overcome before that can happen.
The biggest one is cost.
It was relatively cheap for the Department of Rail and Public Transportation to add the Northeast Regional to Lynchburg because Amtrak has run its Crescent passenger train in the corridor for years. But that isn’t true for the rails to Roanoke, which haven’t seen passenger service for more than 30 years.
A 2008 estimate of necessary track upgrades pegged the cost at $105 million, not including inflation.
The biggest components to that would be laying sections of double track to increase the line’s capacity for passenger trains, as well as a train-turning facility in Roanoke, Pickett said.
The DRPT is now working with Norfolk Southern on refining those costs.
So far, it’s not at all clear that the level of ridership from Roanoke could justify that investment.
An express bus?
One option that’s been bandied about in the meantime is an express bus that makes morning and evening runs between Roanoke and Lynchburg.
Kevin Page, the Department of Rail and Public Transportation’s chief of rail transportation, told a town hall meeting in Roanoke last year that such a bus would be the best way for the Roanoke Valley to demonstrate a commitment to bringing passenger rail service here.
The General Assembly this year directed the DRPT to study the costs of providing such a service. Pickett said the study will be complete by the end of this year.
Some planners with the Roanoke-Alleghany Regional Commission did their own quick study of such a connector bus earlier this year.
It was not particularly encouraging.
The study estimated that it would cost roughly $291,000 annually to operate 359 days per year and that it would carry 8 passengers a day for $4 per trip.
City Manager Chris Morrill said that Roanoke probably could get 85 percent of that cost covered by state and federal matching dollars.
That would leave city taxpayers on the hook for $45,000 annually. But it left even Morrill, who said he wants train service to come to Roanoke, with mixed emotions.
“I’d hate to do the bus and not have a lot of people riding it,” he told me.