Official: Area rail service lags behind

The chairwoman of the Piedmont Rail Coalition, Meredith Richards, told a crowd of supporters Monday that passenger rail service is increasing all over the country, but Charlottesville is painfully behind.

“We are the caboose, basically,” Richards said.

Richards sent a letter on behalf of the coalition last week to Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, outlining the need for the state to partner with Amtrak for increased passenger rail service in the U.S. 29 corridor. In the letter, Richards wrote that Amtrak could implement the new line within two years.

Additionally, the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation will be releasing a draft later this month of its upcoming state rail plan, which will look at all of the state’s transportation corridors to see what types of improvements are needed.

The need on U.S. 29, Richards said, is especially great because area residents often have difficulty obtaining tickets on the trains that travel to and from major cities. Both Amtrak lines that run through Charlotte-sville, the Crescent and the Cardinal, are long-distance trains and have poor track records of being on time — 68 percent for the Crescent, and 18 percent for the Cardinal.

“The trains that are coming through are typically booked solid,” said Richards, a former Charlottesville city councilor.

Since May, 21 local governing bodies unanimously backed a resolution for a regional line from Lynchburg to Washington, D.C., with stops in Charlottesville, Culpeper, Manassas and Alexandria before continuing on to New York. The line would cost $1.9 million annually.

The Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission, the Charlottesville City Council and the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors were some of the first to sign a resolution, all within the first week of May, showing their support. The most recent body to back the resolution was the Rappahannock-Rapidan Planning District Commission, on June 25.

Compared with other transportation projects, “1.9 million is not that much money,” City Councilor Satyendra Huja said.

But Richards conceded that obtaining the funding is the project’s biggest obstacle. This is mostly due to the state’s $1.1 billion revenue shortfall for transportation projects, brought about by lower-than-projected gas and motor vehicle sales tax collections plus the repeal of the abusive-driver fees.

“I don’t know that we can do much about [the shortfall] at this moment,” Richards said. The only way the project would be supported, she said, is to have a sustained, dedicated source of funding from the state to provide the $1.9 million per year.

Delacey Skinner, director of communications for the governor, said the coalition’s letter was just received Monday. She said the governor’s office is reviewing it now and will respond as soon as possible.

“We’ll probably have a response out the door tomorrow,” Skinner said Monday in a phone interview.