Lynchburg-to-D.C. train rolling into city station
ANDREW SHURTLEFF — THE DAILY PROGRESS
Partnering with Amtrak, the state will spend $10.6 million over the next three years to subsidize a new rail service that begins in Lynchburg and terminates at Washington’s Union Station.
A new, daily Amtrak train that will stop in Charlottesville before going to Washington and the Northeast received much fanfare on Wednesday as it rolled into the city’s West Main Street station.
“We’re really pushing rail and public transportation because it’s the wave of the future,” Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said during the train’s whistle-stop tour.
The new train was due to arrive at the station at 2:15 p.m., and it pulled in at roughly 2:24 p.m.
Beginning in Lynchburg, the train officially starts its service today and will add 14 more trips per week in Charlottesville. It came to Charlottesville on Wednesday from Culpeper and then headed to Lynchburg after Kaine — who received a rail hat that said “Chief Engineer,” a train whistle and bandana — hopped on.
Some area residents have advocated for more passenger rail service along the U.S. 29 corridor, most notably Meredith Richards, a former councilor and the chairwoman of CvilleRail and the Piedmont Rail Coalition.
“We haven’t had a new train coming in on this corridor for well over half a century,” Richards said. “For this to have been funded is truly remarkable.”
Partnering with Amtrak, the state will spend $10.6 million over the next three years to subsidize the new train. This is the 15th time Amtrak has partnered with a state for more rail service. Ridership is projected to be between 51,200 and 59,000 passengers per year.
According to a 2007 Virginia Amtrak ridership report, there were 48,190 boardings — riders getting on and off a train — from Charlottesville’s West Main Street station.
“The challenge is showing enough ridership to keep this train in place,” said Del. David J. Toscano, D-Charlottesville. “We’re going to show them what ridership is all about.”
Rail advocates are beaming about the new train’s arrival, but the occasion was also bittersweet for some who had hoped it would cater to business travelers, which would provide the best way to bump up passenger numbers.
In August, officials agreed that the targeted ridership must be reached or the service would fall apart. Richards said in an interview that because of the schedule change, advocates would have to adapt to the new circumstances so that the projected ridership is still reached.
The train was originally scheduled to leave on weekdays from Lynchburg at 5:05 a.m. and arrive at Washington’s Union Station at 8:40 a.m., but that has since been revised to a 7:43 a.m. departure from Lynchburg and an 11:20 a.m. arrival in Washington.
“What I think will be emphasized is leisure travel and student travel. Because in both cases, people aren’t so tied to when they need to arrive,” Richards said.
“For our students, it will be a means to commute on holidays and weekends,” Leonard W. Sandridge, the University of Virginia’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, said on Wednesday.
“It is an option that we, quite frankly, may not have expected,” he said.
Richards said it certainly would be easier to fill the train with regular business travelers. Student and leisure travel, she said, likely would be much more infrequent, but she was not willing to make a guess as to how that might influence the train’s ridership numbers.
“I think it’s going to be harder to fill that train because of that. But that said, just the convenience of it, the fact that it’s a direct service. … I think that’s going to be attractive to many people,” Richards said, adding, “I am just as curious as anyone as to whether this is going to work.”
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Reader Reactions
There are a few organizations that disagree with your learned assessment: MIT, NASA, the National Climactic Data Center, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment,and the EPA, which does consider CO2 to be a pollutant.
We must either modify our style of living or perish. Do you want to bequeath a dead planet to future generations? Wake up!
You clearly don’t have any defense for the man-made global warming theory. I’ll take your lack of response as you throwing up the white flag on this one. The next step is just admitting it to yourself and then following up by reading some scientific studies on it. Plan for what problem??? There is not a problem. CO2 is a necessary and important component of our atmosphere and ecosystem it is not a pollutant. You are equating it to sulfur emissions or something that is destructive to the environment, you are way out of your element here. Do some research and come back to me.
J Carney, you must work in the coal, oil, or natural gas industries in order for you to become so agitated over this issue.
What solution do you and your experts recommend for the rest of us? Are we to continue burning fossil fuels indefinitely or have you a Plan B? Perhaps you have the same academic credentials as Mr. Inhofe and have become a climate expert via osmosis or by pressing your palms on the television, Oral Roberts style.
Really, J Carney, are we supposed to sit back and do nothing because you and a handful of others in the industry want to protect your cash flow?
This article is devoted to passenger rail. If people want to leave their oil burners at home and ride to DC in comfort on the train, why does it grate on your nerves so? What’s it to you?
Sanford & Sons: It seems you are afraid to address the gaping holes, which sink the anthropogenic (man-made) global warming theory. Al Gore won’t debate and defend the science behind it either, despite endless government funding funneled to anyone who can concoct a half-witted study supporting or just mentioning man-made global warming. 34,000 scientists have openly done studies or written objections to the anthropogenic climate change theory. This is despite the intense pressure to go along with this fallacy, sometimes threatening their positions or employment. Scientists were put on the flawed, IPCC pro-global warming study (done by the UN) without their consent and had to threaten legal action to have their names removed from that error filled, highly edited and twisted study. This demonstrates how far the environmental fanatics will go to hide the truth. The co-founder of Greenpeace said that these Environmental Movement currently has little to do with the environment and is largely just a political entity, he also dispelled the man-made global warming myth. The science just is not there to support man-made global warming and Al Gore and yourself refuse to provide scientific evidence to the contrary.
This is what you may be incorrectly referring to when you say there is a “consensus view” that believes in the global warming hoax:
One of the most often cited pieces of evidence that man is causing global warming is a study by Naomi Oreskes that showed 75% of the examined scientific abstracts either explicitly or implicitly backed a view that man was contributing to global warming. This study was done dating back to 1993 and is a bit stale. A new survey using the same methodology was done from the period 2004-07. This study examined peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database, and was conducted by medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte repeating Oreskes’ study. The new study found 528 papers that matched the search results for the period 2004 through February 2007. Of those only 7% gave an explicit endorsement of the “consensus view”. You can either agree that it’s a hoax or find out later after the government imposing crippling policies like cap & tax on industry and consumers at a cost of $1,700 per household, based on Obama’s Treasury’s own estimates.
You should really do some research before you accept the spoon fed liberal viewpoint, think critically don’t just easily accept what the mainstream media repeats over and over.
If you are too lazy to look into the science behind it (based on your lack of response to my 5 fundamental holes in the anthropogenic global warming theory) then just observe anecdotal evidence around you (hardly a substitute for science but in your case it will have to do). Didn’t you realize that we almost didn’t have a summer this year? The ski resorts out west are opening now the earliest in history. They are taking snow days for schools in October in some states, new records. Last year record cold temperatures were recorded all across America. This as similar to the hoax in the 1970s that the world was freezing over. Are we supposed to fall for it, every time alarmists cry wolf?
Stamford:
Maybe it is the low-income members of Charlottesville society that you dislike so. That is a pity.
You know what, Stamford. You’re absolutely right about everything. I dislike low-income members of Charlottesville society.
See ya!
You’re welcome. By the way, I don’t really walk on cross ties. That would not be a recommended practice for several reasons. The moniker comes from a line in a song.
Thank you, CrossTieWalker, for two detailed and insightful commentaries. I appreciate your historical views but I won’t be joining anyone in the lounge car. Nice thought though.
I would like to address Amtrak’s faults, though I am a supporter. While it does appear to be the case that, in general, outfits that are not required to earn a profit may tend to develop an employee culture of lassitude and apathy, I am not sure that Amtrak’s faults are wholly a result of this phenomenon. All enterprises need adequate capital before they can enter into business. Amtrak has never had adequate capital. When it began operation in May 1971, Amtrak inherited passenger cars and locomotives from the private-sector railroads that had decided to host it (only the Southern Ry, the Rock Island and the Rio Grande elected to stay out for the time being). Those other railroads who decided to host Amtrak also paid one-time start-up funds equal to a certain multiple of their previous losses on passenger operations (I do not recall the exact formula, but it was something like one or two times). In any case, Amtrak was given conflicting mandates from the beginning: offer intensive corridor services in the Northeast (where some trains arguably made a profit) and continue to run the long-distance cross-country trains inherited from the private-sector railroad companies; many of these runs ran, at heavy losses, through politically potent districts, unsurprisingly. The business model was guaranteed not to work. Yet politics kept the operation afloat for decades, with just enough funds to buy band-aids for the equipment (yes, Amtrak was able to replace its inherited WW2-era equipment with more modern rolling stock and motive power in the 70s and later in the 90s). But funds for recurring capital expenditures were slim, spotty and subject to Congressional moods, all the while swimming uptide against Repulican Administrations’ attempts to kill the whole thing, regardless of the essential nature of the corridor services. Had Amtrak started life with decent equipment that was not already 25 years old, its reputation might have been different. In addition, Amtrak did not, and largely does not yet, operate on its own tracks; the private-sector railroads have been hosting Amtrak as a kind of tenant, with little regard for Amtrak’s need to keep a schedule or for the maintenance standards of the track structure itself. In recent years, as freight rail posted record earnings and capital spending programs ramped up, the physical infrastructure has improved dramatically (no more bumpy track outside terminal areas), but the improvements have only considered the needs of freight. Coal and passengers have different hauling demands, reflected in the layout of tracks and signaling systems. Amtrak has been the merest of afterthoughts, if that, in the expansion programs of the modern freight rail industry.
All that, however, is soon to be history. Having spent far too many hours sitting in traffic on major corridor Interstates, just enough people are fed up with wasting time and money fooling around with autmobile travel in these dense areas that a constituency is fast building for enhanced passenger rail. The Federal Railroad Administration just announced today that it would push back its deadline for deciding how to award the initial $8 billion in stimulus funds because it had received proposals for far more projects than it was prepared to review in the time previously allotted. This bespeaks at least some gathering winds in the political sails that have been unfurled. And there has been some talk of at least some freight railroads resuming private-sector operation of passenger rail over their own lines, in which case, this whole debate over use of taxpayer funds becomes idle.
As for the irritable repartee among my fellow commentators, perhaps they both need to board the Southern Crescent and head to the lounge car for a nice cold brew.
You confuse pity for condescension. You appear to dislike the federal government; at least your remarks about government services seem to support your revulsion for low-cost mail delivery and low-cost transportation. Maybe it is the low-income members of Charlottesville society that you dislike so. That is a pity.
Right. I suppose condescension:
Calm down, Albert. Try breathing into a paper bag after taking your medications…. No one is going to harm you. Rest and you’ll feel better in the morning.
and insult rather than debate
But your stupid attack on CvilleRail for “subsidizing leisure travel” obviates
are what passes for humor in Stamford’s world. How could one not see the hilarity? Lucky for me your words are preserved on the web page for the public to see, or else folks might think you’re being honest.
Lastly, you have no idea what my politics are about. It’s amusing, though, to see you ignorantly grasping at stereotypical straws to try to paint me in a negative light.
I wonder if it will succeed in distracting from your “sense of humor.“
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