An Amtrak Northeast Regional train departs downtown Richmond, Va.
Chase Gunnoe
RICHMOND, Va. — The state of Virginia’s Atlantic Gateway Project is getting a major funding boost. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe announced this week that the project has been selected as a recipient of a federal FASTLANE grant of $165 million. The federal grants will leverage more than $500 million in private investments and more than $700 million in other transportation funding.
The $1.4 billion project looks to relieve rail congestion along the I-95 corridor with the construction of 14 new miles of rail in the area of Long Bridge. The funding will also look into acquiring CSX Transportation’s S-line rail corridor that runs from North Carolina to the Richmond area for the location of the proposed Southeast High Speed rail corridor.
“Our administration worked with federal, state, local and private sector parties to submit a package of transportation improvements that will have far-reaching benefits for everyone who travels the Commonwealth, whether by car, bus or train,” McAuliffe says.
to Merrill Perkins: it doesn’t matter whether the line was simply mothballed, or abandoned. To be upgraded for higher speed operations (90, or 110), all new rail would have to be laid on all new ties on all new ballast. They would not be able to simply “refurbish” the old rails, ties, ballast, etc.
Al Dicenzo, most of the S-line in NC is still intact and still active, but it needs to be upgraded for high-speed operations. The Final Tier II EIS is done. The question is whether the NC legislature will come up with the funds to move the project forward. It will take a lot to upgrade the current S-line for 110-mph operations (and will require purchasing a fair bit of land adjacent to the current ROW in order to straighten curves).
Gov. Terry McAuliffe was on WTOP radio’s As the Governor program.
Your tax dollars hard at work. And CSX might have gotten more money for an intact rail line.
Another example of “penny wise pound foolish” – CSX (or was it SCL who did so?) should have mothballed the “S” line, rather than abandoning it outright. It’s a lot less expensive to restore an intact rail line than rebuild an abandoned one, but I suppose that’s what us taxpayers are there for …
At the time (1986), I recall hearing one reason for ripping it up was that CSX didn’t want NS to get the line.
CSX “shuttered” the line in the fall of 1986 and removed the tracks the following year. However, this followed SCL practice of removing most trains from the S Line after the merger took place.
Maybe if the states didn’t tax the RR r-o-w so much way back when, the RRs would’ve had incentive to keep them intact
Unless and until North Carolina agrees to add their portion of the line from the state line southward to Raleigh, the “High Speed Rail” corridor extends only for another (meaningless) 25 miles. Raleigh must be included to make it truly worthwhile.