Asheville could take bus to Salisbury to get to train

ASHEVILLE – The city's first regularly scheduled passenger rail service since 1975 might actually be by bus.

Amtrak is studying establishing a dedicated bus service as soon as 2016 to carry passengers between Asheville and Salisbury, where passengers could connect with trains serving several other Piedmont cities and possibly points as far north as Boston.

The service would give travelers to and from Asheville and seven other communities along the bus route access to train travel in the relatively near future in the hope of building enough ridership to eventually justify passenger trains on the railroad line between Asheville and Salisbury, said Paul Worley, head of the state Department of Transportation's Rail Division.

Local and state officials and would-be rail passengers have pushed for establishing rail service to Asheville for more than 10 years but not much has happened besides renovation of train depots along the route. The city and state bought property in Biltmore Village in 2005 as a site for a future station, which has not been built.

The effort to establish bus service may have a similar outcome. Worley said DOT does not have any money to allocate to the service, so the study would probably have to indicate that bus service would break even before Amtrak or the state would establish it.

"We just don't have the cash" to significantly subsidize the route, Worley said.

The state's draft long-range rail plan calls for establishing rail service between Asheville and Salisbury sometime between 2020 and 2035 at an initial cost of $405.3 million. The figure includes track improvements to allow for higher train speeds.

A 2001 study put the cost of starting rail service at $135 million. Worley said more study would be required to get a reliable estimate of the current cost.

Poll: Do you support a bus service from Asheville to Salisbury to connect with trains?

The lure of rail

Amtrak ridership has set records almost annually since 2003, a trend some transportation planners say reflects an increased interest in public transportation in general in the United States. The national passenger railroad carried 30.9 million passengers in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Growth slowed in FY 2014, however, with passenger traffic up only 0.2 percent from the year before. Amtrak attributed that to a harsh winter that meant trains sometimes did not run and congestion on the tracks that affected on-time performance.

Amtrak now covers 93 percent of its costs through ticket sales and other revenue. Routes in its Northeast Corridor have seen growth while many long-distance routes serving more rural areas of the country have seen declines.

Passenger boardings of trains in North Carolina rose 93.3 percent from 2002-13, state DOT says, while population statewide increased 20.1 percent. Most of the population growth was in metropolitan areas, many of which already have Amtrak service.

Asheville is closer to the Greenville, South Carolina, Amtrak station, but only two trains stop there, the north and south Crescents, and they stop during the night, Worley said. North Carolina doesn't run state-supported trains south of Charlotte, the DOT rail director said.

Salisbury sees four Amtrak trains in each direction daily.

Amtrak's Piedmont trains run twice a day in each direction between Raleigh and Charlotte. The Carolinian runs once a day each way between Charlotte and New York and The Crescent passes through Greensboro, Salisbury and Charlotte on its route between New York and New Orleans, although its North Carolina stops are in the middle of the night.

The state pays Amtrak about $5.25 million a year to operate the Piedmont and Carolinian. DOT's draft rail plan calls for adding two more trains daily between Raleigh and Charlotte over the next five years.

Amtrak offers connecting bus service, called Thruway Motor Coach Service, to bring passengers to and from several trains around the country. It initiated two Thruway routes in eastern North Carolina in 2012, one between Wilson and Morehead City, the other between Wilson and Wilmington.

Those bus routes, which connect with trains running between New York and Savannah, Georgia, carried 14,206 passengers from December 2013 to November 2014, Amtrak spokeswoman Kimberly Woods said.

The routes are "seen as an opportunity for near-term connectivity as well as building service," Worley said.

An Amtrak study to determine how many people might take a Thruway bus between Asheville and Salisbury should be completed in late March, Worley said. The route likely would include stops in Black Mountain, Old Fort, Marion and other communities between the two cities.

He said the buses typically offer "a pretty nice coach experience" similar to chartered buses. They would run along Interstate 40 from Asheville east to Statesville, then veer off a bit to the southeast to Salisbury.

The quality of the services varies around the country, but they are typically a cut above a typical inter-city bus service, said Sean Jeans-Gail, vice president of the National Association of Railroad Passengers.

"That's the way you start building ridership," Worley said. "If you can't deliver rail, what's the next best thing?"

The slow route?

A key question for the study will be where riders who might take a Thruway bus want to go, Worley said.

With current schedules, connections are likely to be best in the Charlotte-Greensboro-Raleigh corridor, he said. Train travel between Salisbury and Raleigh now takes about two and a half hours and roughly 45 minutes for a trip between Salisbury and Charlotte, Amtrak timetables say.

Tacking on a bus ride of at least 130 miles to or from Asheville means a trip to Raleigh or Charlotte by bus and train would take longer than driving — Raleigh is about a four hour drive and Charlotte takes about two hours — but leave a traveler free to work or just look out the window during the trip.

Whether that is enough of an incentive to get people to take a bus and train instead of their own car is a question Worley hopes the study will answer.

Jeans-Gail said he could think of at least three instances around the country in which Thruway bus service eventually led to expanded rail service.

He said his organization would prefer that Amtrak get money to significantly expand rail service, but Thruway service offers a way around a shortage of funds to do that.

"With the way the investment picture is in the United States and Congress and the states really struggling to find additional sources of revenue, it really makes sense in the short term," he said.

Worley estimated that if tracks between Asheville and Salisbury are improved, a train trip between the two cities would take just more than three hours, including stops in between.

There is a good chance that bus service would actually be faster, he said. Freight trains must slow almost to a crawl to ascend or descend the winding rail grade between Old Fort and Ridgecrest that includes turn after turn and several tunnels.

"That's quite a trip," Worley said. "It's both beautiful and neat to take. On the other hand, it takes a long time."

Marla Tambellini, spokeswoman at the Asheville Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the vast majority of tourists visiting Asheville get here by car and it is difficult to say how many people would be interested in coming by bus or train.

"Obviously there's a great legacy of train travel into the Asheville area. We can really attribute some of Asheville's success as a destination to back in the 1880s when trains started coming," she said. Passenger service to Asheville ceased in 1975.

One potential customer is city resident Linda Schlensker, a dance teacher whose job takes her to cities around the country.

She has vision issues and does not drive. She said she has not had good experiences with inter-city bus travel and dislikes flying because the carbon footprint of airliners is so significant.

Taking the train might be more convenient and environmentally friendly, Schlensker said.

"I would definitely try it a few times," she said. "Not driving, I'm open to anything."

Rail improvements between Andrews and Murphy possible

A proposed draft rail plan for the state calls for spending $16.4 million to renovate roughly 15 miles of rail line between Andrews and Murphy sometime between 2021 and 2025.

The state Department of Transportation owns the line, which a local railroad official said has not been used since the late 1990s.

The Great Smoky Mountains Railroad once operated occasional scenic excursion trains on the line, but abandoned it because ridership was low, said Kim Albritton, vice president and general manager.

The railroad owns the track between Dillsboro and Andrews and offers excursion trains in Jackson and Macon counties.

The railroad has been discussing track restoration in Cherokee County with DOT in connection with an industrial prospect that was considering locating a manufacturing plant in an empty plant building in Marble, between Andrews and Murphy, Albritton said.

Great Smoky does not now operate freight trains because of lack of demand, but, "We'd very much like to be a freight hauler," she said.

However, Albritton said the manufacturing prospect did not materialize and there would not be enough passenger traffic on the route to justify the railroad paying for revitalization. Ties and trestles on the line need replacement, she said.

If the railroad did operate excursion trains on the track, which mostly passes through farmland, the schedule would probably be limited to special events or weekends, she said.

The rail plan is scheduled to be adopted sometime in 2015. Carrying out its provisions would be dependent on the availability of funding.