The North Carolina Department of Transportation is pursuing expanded passenger rail service across the state through the federal government’s Corridor Identification and Development (Corridor ID) Program as the state sees record ridership year-over-year.
The Corridor ID Program is a part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act which passed in late 2021 under the Biden administration. The bill allocated $1.8 billion to developing rail corridors across the country in an effort to improve passenger rail service.
NCDOT has had seven corridors selected for the Corridor ID Program by the USDOT Federal Railroad Administration, with NCDOT receiving $500,000 per corridor, standard for the first stage of the Corridor ID program. These include routes to fast-growing urban areas such as Wilmington alongside reactivating former corridors out west to Asheville and Hickory.
Jason Myers, rail programs manager for the NCDOT rail division said the program allows the department to work towards North Carolina’s plan for state-supported passenger rail by funding studies on those rail corridors.
“When we’re done with Corridor ID, we’ll have a list of projects we need to build, we’ll know roughly what it’ll cost us, and we’ll be able to … keep building those projects,” Myers said. “The Corridor ID process is intended to be very precise, to help result in agreements with the railroads, to be robust and something that can be implemented.”
North Carolina is served by two state-supported services funded by the State’s Department of Transportation and several long-distance Amtrak-operated services. These are the Carolinian, which runs from Charlotte to New York City and the Piedmont, from Charlotte to Raleigh.
The services are run on tracks owned by the North Carolina Railroad Company, a private, for-profit corporation whose sole shareholder is the state of North Carolina. Any increase in service along these tracks requires negotiation with the company which currently leases the track to Norfolk Southern, one of the largest freight railroads in the country.
“That basically means that we have both Norfolk Southern that we have to work with as well as North Carolina Railroad Company,” Myers said. “[The company] sees itself very much as a freight railroad and as they should, they’re serving the port of Morehead City and industries up and down that corridor from Charlotte all the way to the coast.”
This push for expansion comes amid record ridership for NC By Train, with the services seeing a combined 59% increase in ridership since 2019. The increased ridership is attributed to the addition of a fifth round-trip service between Charlotte and Raleigh, a shift in consumer behavior as well as special train service to events such as the N.C. State Fair and 2024 U.S. Open.
North Carolina is also seeing growth on the manufacturing end of passenger rail. Siemens opened its new rail manufacturing facility in Lexington in early April, where the next-generation of Amtrak equipment will be constructed. This equipment, known as the Airo fleet, is currently in the testing phase and will begin service in late 2026. Despite the upcoming rollout date, local passengers will have to wait a little longer to ride the new set.
“[The Carolinian] should have Airo equipment on it next year, maybe early in the year after, as these things are tested and rolled out,” Myers said. “There’s a pecking order of sorts that Amtrak is committed to in terms of rolling out their equipment on those lines, and I believe that the Carolinian is very near the top of that, though we’re not the very top.”
For towns and cities along the corridors studied, planning for the future is needed in order to take maximum advantage of any potential rail project. At-large Raleigh City Council member Johnathan Lambert-Melton said that using “station-area planning” and other planning tools around transit are steps that the city of Raleigh is currently taking for other transit expansion.
“We have various planning tools that we use around transit,” Lambert-Melton said. “We do station-area planning … I think the planning is really more important for these towns and cities along these proposed routes to get their infrastructure up and running.”
Lambert-Melton also noted that Raleigh Union Station, a facility owned by the city, was built with expansion in mind.
“Raleigh Union Station was built a few years ago, there’s room for expansion there, more platforms to accommodate more trains,” Lambert-Melton said. “I think [that] would be something that the city would welcome.”
These towns and municipalities are already involved in the project according to Myers, with NCDOT asking them to contribute to the funding needed for the second stage of Corridor ID.
“We’re going and having conversations with local elected officials and regional planners and folks in those communities that stand to benefit over whether there’s an interest in contributing that ten percent,” said Myers. “We’re asking the city of Wilmington and [New Hanover County] … to contribute a proportional share to extending service to Wilmington.”
While preparation for expansion of intercity passenger rail in the state is ongoing, no projects will be completed without buy-in and funding from the General Assembly. Rail expansion projects are costly and time-consuming, which can serve as barriers to obtaining funding.
“The funding is very much a political question. We’re doing as employees of the state what the existing state budget [and] policy is asking us to do, which is to operate trains between [Charlotte]-New York and Raleigh-Charlotte,” Myers said. “If we want to operate more trains, we’ll need to be asked to do that by the General Assembly, and we believe that will happen. We’re asked to work towards that, but we can’t promise that it’s actually gonna happen.”
