(The following story by Geoffrey Graybeal appeared on The Herald-Sun website on March 10.)
HILLSBOROUGH, N.C. — Brian Lowen remembers the reaction of folks at the barbershop when an Amtrak passenger train sped through downtown Mebane recently at the 5th and Church street intersection.
“They come through significantly faster than it has been in the past and it’s pretty alarming,” said Lowen, a Hillsborough Town Board member who works in Mebane. “People, they definitely take notice. You’re looking like ‘wow!’ because it moves through so quickly.”
Lowen envisions similar eye-popping experiences when trains that pass through Hillsborough increase their speeds next week.
“It’ll be interesting to see what areas of Hillsborough that you’ll see that,” said Lowen, who can hear the train’s whistle blow from his home in northern Hillsborough. “It’ll be interesting to see and hear what that’s like [here].”
The Piedmont and Carolinian routes between Hillsborough and Cary are increasing from maximum speeds of 59 mph to 79 mph. In Hillsborough, where tracks are curvy, passenger trains will operate at speeds up to 65 mph, up from the current speed of 55 mph. The most significant speed increase will be east of Driver Street in Durham where the passenger train speed limit will rise from 20 mph to 70 mph.
“They’ll notice the difference when they ride the train,” said Julia Hegele of the N.C. Department of Transportation Rail Division. “From a motorist standpoint depending on where they are they may or may not notice a difference. For the passenger trains, where we’re increasing from 20 mph to 70 mph they may notice a difference. In some of the areas where it’s just going up 10, 15, 20 mph they may or may not notice that.”
Hegele urged passers-by to be cautious at railroad crossings.
“We’d like to encourage everybody to pay attention and we hope everybody is going to notice it because we don’t want anybody out there trying to beat the train,” she said. “We don’t want that anyway, but we especially don’t want that now.”
The railroad tracks roughly run parallel to Interstate 85 and are most visible at crossings along Bellevue and West Hill streets in Hillsborough.
Transportation officials have been working with the North Carolina Railroad and Norfolk Southern Railway to install a new train control signal system and have banked numerous curves on the tracks.
Crews in East Durham have removed two diamond crossings and replaced them with a series of switches that will enable trains to switch tracks faster.
The track and signal improvements are part of a $27 million project designed to increase capacity and reduce travel time between Cary and Greensboro.
“It’s going to reduce the travel time from the passenger trains making it a little more close to being auto competitive,” Hegele said. “Our goal is to make it comparable to the time it would take to drive. We don’t know if we’ll be able to get it exactly. Of course, sometimes it depends on what traffic is like. Sometimes we beat them, sometimes they beat us.”
Of the state’s 433,654 train passengers last year, 29,418 got on or off trains in Durham and 10,272 got on or off a train in Burlington.
Lowen envisions a station in Hillsborough one day.
“As they continue their improvements in trying to decrease the amount of time between stops, I hope that at some point they will consider putting a stop in Hillsborough,” he said. “I think it will go a long way in revitalizing an area of town.”
About an acre of land at the Hampton Pointe shopping center has been reserved for a future transit stop.
While the trains will start moving faster next week, the departure times will not be adjusted until April.