qm_spring

irginia

apitol

onnections

, S

pring

2016

safety, the trend appears to have peaked, as more people rode public

transportation last year than in any year since the 1950s.

Raymond Smoot, co-chair of NRV Rail 2020, said movers and

shakers in the New River Valley are actively pursuing the extension

of rail service that now stops in Lynchburg and will by next year stop

in Roanoke to continue to Christiansburg along the existing Norfolk

Southern line. Smoot notes that, “We want to give the impression, and

this is accurate, that this is a broad-based effort. We have bipartisan

support. Why do we want it? To enhance mobility within the state to

and from the New River Valley. Between [Virginia] Tech and Radford

[University], there are 15,000 to 20,000 students who are from the

northeast corridor from Northern Virginia to Boston. We need safer

transportation. We need alternatives. When the students are leaving on

break or coming back, Interstate 81 is almost a parking lot.

“Rail gives another option, a safer, more environmentally friendly

way to make this trip. And it’s more relaxing and fun. Passenger rail

gets to Roanoke in 2017, so it seems reasonable to get it through the

next phase [to Christiansburg] in three years.”

Right now, there is a bus that will take passengers from Roanoke

to Lynchburg to catch the train. They can take it from Blacksburg to

Lynchburg on the weekends.

“We’re looking for awareness

at the state level,” Smoot said.

“It’s only another 32 miles from

Christiansburg to Roanoke, so it

makes sense to do that extension,

and the current railroad is double-

track all the way. When you look

at travel patterns, you see that

when people travel from the New

River Valley, most are going up

the northeast corridor. There are a number of tenants at the Corporate

Research Center [in Blacksburg] that have relationships with companies

in NorthernVirginia. Tech has a center in Arlington and there are more

relationships there. The truth is that now you drive or you don’t go.

You can fly from Roanoke to Dulles, but nowhere else in the state,

and those flights are limited. Train service will enhance mobility. Life

in the future will be dictated by mobility. People don’t want to live in

places you can’t get to or from.”

“We’re trying to raise awareness of the rationale of doing it,” Akers

agreed. “Our studies show that we can support [passenger] rail here.

The only roadblocks are funding and planning. The General Assembly,

the state, will pay most of it. The localities will contribute.”

Even in the heyday of passenger service in the area, the Norfolk

and Western, predecessor of the Norfolk Southern, never got more

than 5% of their revenue from passengers. Everything else came from

freight, principally coal. They have augmented their income during a

period where coal is diminishing with intermodal freight and oil.

“The extension of service from Washington down to Lynchburg

which occurred about eight years ago has far exceeded the utilization

that was forecast,” Smoot said. “It’s been profitable and has returned

money to Amtrak. We expect the extension of the line to the New

River Valley will do so as well. For a long time, we’ve been willing

to subsidize our highways in a way that we haven’t been willing to

subsidize our rail and our airports. Show me an airport that’s making

money. Transportation is a subsidized service. We’re not building

many more interstate highways. Few of us will live to see anything

other than spot improvements on our Interstate highways. Rail has an

infrastructure that is already in place, and it’s easily scalable, safer, and

more environmentally friendly.”

Michael Abraham is a businessman and author. He was raised in

Christiansburg and lives in Blacksburg. He is currently working on

his eighth book, a travelogue following the old Norfolk andWestern

passenger rail service from Norfolk to Cincinnati, the Powhatan Arrow.

“You can’t get there from here,” is

a largely outdated notion, as these days

you can be almost anywhere in the world

by tomorrow. But how we get where

we want to go evolves constantly and

trends in engineering, economics, and the

environment will drive changes in how we

in Virginia travel to and from the New River

Valley in the next generation or two. For

some visionaries in the area, the new answer

may be an update of an old answer: trains.

The New River Valley has the highest

concentration of higher education in the state; and cost, access,

and traffic concerns have kept many students car-free. But while

the area’s towns and city (principally Blacksburg, Christiansburg,

and Radford) are increasing options for local buses, bicycling, and

pedestrian movement, trips out of the area are still limited. Interstate

81 is effectively the area’s sole surface link to the rest of the world; the

nearest train is in Lynchburg or Clifton Forge, both 90 minutes away.

The last passenger railroads chugged through the New RiverValley

in the late 1970s (in its later years

with sporadic Amtrak service), and

for many it is time to bring them

back. NRV Rail 2020, composed of

local governments, universities, and

economic development agencies, is

leading the way.

Diane Akers, president of

Blacksburg Partnership says, “We

want to keep the idea of passenger

rail coming to the New RiverValley

in front of legislators, business people and people of influence. 2020 is

our target date for return of service.” (The Blacksburg Partnership is

the economic development organization of the Town of Blacksburg,

Virginia Tech, and the business community.)

Consider these trends. In 1983, more than 91 percent of 20-to-24-

year-olds had a drivers’ license. Twenty years later, the number had

dropped to 77 percent. A Pew Research Survey found that 48 percent

of Americans prefer walkable urban areas over suburbs. And our cities

are growing faster than our suburban and rural areas.

For much of our nation’s history, especially prior to World War II,

development was tightly magnetized towards city centers. Automobiles

were rare and expensive, and transportation was a mix of busses,

trollies, trains, bicycles, and walking. The emergence of the automobile

de-magnetized communities, spreading outward our housing, schools,

shopping, and workplaces. This became a self-accelerating feedback

system, in that the new suburban communities required cars for

essentially every trip. Now, with concerns about cost, sustainability, and

NRV Passenger Rail may come back to the New River Valley

By Michael Abraham