It’s 6:45 p.m., still light outside, and Rosalie Catanoso has just arrived at the train station in downtown Greensboro.
Catanoso, a freshman in English, traveled home on the train Wednesday to prepare for a flight to New York today.
And walking up the steps of a passenger car and then back down them 80 miles later isn’t new to Catanoso. In a phone interview, she said she rides the train roundtrip from Raleigh to Greensboro and back again about three times a month.
“Whenever I go home on the weekends. I usually take it to Greensboro and from Greensboro, on Friday afternoon and on Sunday night,” Catanoso said. “It’s usually pretty filled up, but I don’t think I’ve ever had to sit next to anyone. I always have an entire section to myself, which is nice. I just listen to music and zone out.”
The train ride from the Raleigh train station to Greensboro usually takes about an hour and a half, Catanoso said, and Wednesday’s trip was no different.
But if the North Carolina Department of Transportation gets a piece of federal funding that allocates $8 billion toward implementing or improving nationwide high-speed railroads, that trip could be shortened to about an hour by 2015.
Those traveling north from Raleigh up to Washington, D.C., could find two hours knocked off their travel times.
The funding is part of the $787 billion stimulus package that passed successfully through Congress last month.
The move to expedite travel time started in 1992, when the United States DOT chose five locations for high-speed rail corridors.
One of those was the Southeast Corridor, part of which runs from Charlotte to Washington, D.C., passing through Richmond, Va. and Raleigh.
James Harris, state rail coordination engineer for the N.C. DOT, said he expects the Southeast High-Speed Rail Corridor to be one of the first to collect funding. Both Virginia and North Carolina — states through which the SEHSR runs — have completed most of the paperwork, such as environmental surveys, that the government requires before it grants funding.
Harris said although the DOT has not yet applied for funding because it’s still trying to figure out how much is available and for what, he expects the DOT will file an application soon.
And any amount of funding, he said, will shorten the timeline for the project’s completion.
“We donít get funding like highway projects do. We go and try to find money because we donít have a dedicated pot of money that we grab from,” Harris said. “The stimulus money gets us a jump start.”
One of the project’s first priorities is to acquire a strip of abandoned railway that runs from the North Carolina/Virginia border to Petersburg, Va. To accommodate speeds of 110 miles per hour — the speed that SEHSR employees project the new trains will attain from Raleigh into Virginia — the states’ DOTs will have to tear up the existing rail and build a completely new track.
It’s this last step, along with other construction and engineering aspects of the project that is difficult to fund. Harris said the DOTs must construct new tracks and repair curves on tracks that cannot sustain high speeds.
“Just like on certain curves you canít drive your car 60 miles per hour, you can’t take faster trains on some parts of train tracks,” said Keith Lewis, who is working with the project to install trails adjacent to the Southeast Corridor. “They’ll make some realignments where the curves are too sharp for the speed.”
Harris said the rural areas of Virginia will allow room for additional tracks so that passenger trains will not have to stop for freight trains.
Track construction, Harris said, could rack up a bill as high as $2 billion.
“We’re talking billions,” he said. “Just from Raleigh to Richmond, we’re looking at 160 miles. At $5 million a mile — and it may be more than that — that’s $800 million.”
Using the same calculation, repairs to the 105-mile track from Richmond to the Southeast Corridor’s final stop in Washington, D.C. will cost an additional $525 million.
Much of the remaining cost lies in eight additional trains — four traveling from Charlotte to Washington, D.C. and four traveling in the opposite direction — and improvements to existing trains, Harris said.
In total, the North Carolina and Virginia DOTs are looking at a total bill of $5 to $6 billion, according to the SEHSR Web site.
It’s a number Harris and his peers aren’t planning on throwing around without first completing some research.
The DOT has been collecting data since 1992 about what it would take to build a high-speed railway, where it should go and how many patrons the trains would need to stay in operation, Harris said.
Such research is a mandatory measure if the DOT hopes to garner taxpayer money.
“No one in the federal government is going to go out and fund a $2 billion project that no one rides,” Harris said, adding that “through the studies it’s shown that we will get the ridership to cover the operating costs of the train.”
Harris said the high-speed trains will target those who are traveling for business. The normal passenger now, he said, purchases a train ticket for leisure.
If that new sector of passengers becomes frequent travelers on high-speed trains, Harris said the new lines will capture two percent of the Southeast Corridor’s ridership.
And that’s all it needs to maintain a profit margin.
But to get federal funding, the DOT must collect comprehensive environmental data of the areas through which the high-speed trains will run. This process, which began in 2000, will take at least another year, according to Harris.
“You can’t just take taxpayer money to build something that impacts things like wetlands or minority neighborhoods,” Harris said.
So even if the DOT secures funding from the stimulus package, Harris said it will not be able to use any of it until it finishes the document that states the environment immediately surrounding the railway will be minimally affected.
“Even if we had $2 billion in stimulus money to get, we wouldnít be able to use it unless you get the environmental document. That’s the criteria right there as to who qualifies right now. We’re getting close to the end of it,” Harris said. “I’ve been hearing that ours is ahead of all the others. Otherwise, weíve been funding this a little bit at a time.”
