Why improving passenger service at Main Street Station may be economically - and politically - impossible. by Peter Galuszka
A state official says rail expansion may bypass Main Street Station.
The air was dense as some of Richmond’s big movers and shakers filed into a meeting downtown June 4 at the gunmetal gray-and-glass Richmond Times-Dispatch building.
Newspaper publisher Thomas A. Silvestri, chairman-elect of the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce, had offered the headquarters as a meeting place for the Capital Region Collaborative, one of the many leadership groups charged with planning the area’s future. The guest speaker was Thelma Drake, a former Republican representative from Hampton Roads and who heads the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation.
What Drake had to say stunned the gathering. A new Amtrak train that will start service in 2013 from Norfolk to Washington, running through Petersburg, won’t stop at the ornate, Renaissance revival Main Street Station built in downtown Richmond in 1901. Instead it will service the blocky Staples Mill Road station in the Henrico County suburbs.
Richmond’s business elite had pinned hopes for better rail service and new higher-speed passenger trains on Main Street Station, which reopened for limited passenger service in 2004. Lots of urban revival plans center on the landmark station as a catalyst to revitalize Shockoe Bottom and downtown. More worrisome is that access to federal money for rail service is dependent on center city stations. Main Street Station is Richmond’s official downtown designee.
Even though no newspaper reporter attended the Times-Dispatch meeting, according to people who were there, one was summoned to record the frustration of the group. “We want to get the word out that Main Street Station is the way to go,” says Charles E. Gates Jr., communications coordinator for the Richmond Regional Planning District Commission, which oversees the Capital Region Collaborative with the chamber.
Jennifer Pickett, a spokeswoman with the department of rail and public transportation, says that eventually the Norfolk Amtrak train will use the Main Street Station, but only after about $600 million in capital improvements can be made to a freight-train line that follows Interstate 95 roughly from Petersburg to downtown. Gates says such improvement will cost only $122 million, still a substantial amount of money in a tax-averse state that can’t afford $20 billion in needed road improvements.
While an architectural gem, Main Street Station has always been a diamond in the rough. Rail historians say it was already obsolete when construction was finished in 1901. The larger, more efficient Union Station on Broad Street, now home to the Virginia Science Museum, was a bigger operator during passenger rail’s golden age more than a half a century ago.
Today, Main Street Station can serve only trains originating at Newport News on the Peninsula, meaning that most of Hampton Roads’ population has to drive long distances and negotiate often-crammed harbor tunnels just to take Amtrak, which has an abysmal statewide on-time rate of just 52.4 percent.
Only two daily trains stop at Main Street Station, with five others operating on five-day or one-day-a-week schedules. Richmond’s rail boosters say Main Street Station has seen a positive increase in ridership in recent years. In fiscal year 2009, Tracy Connell, an Amtrak spokeswoman, says ridership at Main Street was 23,576, an increase of 4,216 over fiscal year 2008. Still, it’s a drop in the bucket compared with Staples Mill, which had 256,006 riders in fiscal 2009.
Main Street doesn’t compare favorably with other Virginia stations either. Lorton has the highest level for the month of March, with 24,570 riders, according to the state Department of Rail and Public Transportation. Alexandria, Newport News and Charlottesville all had substantially higher ridership numbers than Main Street Station as well.
To allow passenger trains to use Main Street Station from the south, substantial capital expenses would have to be made. Passenger trains today take CSX lines until they get to Centralia Road, where they branch to the left to take an A route that crosses the James River using a historic 1902 bridge, then following Powhite Parkway, Interstate 195 and beyond to Staples Mill Station.
At Centralia Road, a little-used freight line known as the “S” line branches to the northeast and runs parallel to Interstate 95 near the Philip Morris USA cigarette plant and various warehouses past Commerce Road and on to Main Street Station. Pickett says that the line isn’t equipped with needed signals and other gear, and that more improvements would have to be made north of downtown to bypass the busy Acca freight yard in order to use Main Street Station. Her department has prepared a study estimating that all of the upgrades will cost $591.6 million. Gates says that using Main Street can be achieved for far less, only $122 million, but doesn’t provide details.
Regardless, funding is unavailable. When the Obama administration provided $8 billion for higher-speed rail service nationally, Virginia applied for more than $1 billion but received just $75 million to fix tracks in Stafford and Prince William counties. More federal money should be available for rail in the future, which is an Obama transportation priority.
Using public-private funding could be considered. A recent report done for the state by the corporate finance section of accounting giant KPMG, says that too much of such funding has been spent on roads and should be used for other sectors such as rail. The state has a rail enhancement fund that includes private equity, but the fund pays out only $23 million, far less than what’s needed to expand service at Main Street Station.
The ultimate question, however, is whether Main Street Station is worth more than a half-billion dollars to upgrade tracks for upgraded service that averages a meager 2,000 passengers each month. That level is four times less than monthly ridership in Charlottesville, a much smaller city, and 10 times less than the Staples Mill station.
This isn’t to say that passenger rail has no future. Officials were surprised when a new Amtrak train that began service from Lynchburg to Washington in October surpassed its projected annual ridership levels in less than six months. Pickett says that Amtrak tapped a ready market that includes college students looking for cheap and convenient transportation to the Northeast. The train leaves Lynchburg at 7:30 a.m. and arrives in Boston at 3:30 p.m.
The Main Street Station conundrum raises other issues as well. One is why communication seems so poor between the administration of Gov. Bob McDonnell, who appointed Drake, and Richmond’s Republican-leaning corporate and civic leaders? The other is one of fiscal responsibility: Should the rest of the state bear the burden of improving Main Street Station when cheaper, more efficient solutions are available?
One point of clarification. I do agree that the Staples Mill station is an ugly, blocky, sorry excuse for a station. However, the long-term goal as outlined in the plan for Richmond-Hampton Roads High Speed Rail is to replace Staples Mill with a new station at Parham Road (where a nice chunk of empty land exists), along with increasing service to Main St Station.
I wholeheartedly support the idea of increasing service to Main St Station, however if it costs THAT much to do it, I'd rather get service to Norfolk 3 years from now, and get the Main St service expanded 6 years from now, as opposed to waiting 5-6 years until the whole shebang is done. Put another way, the sooner we get the basic start-up service to Norfolk initiated, the more people will be seeing the benefits and clamoring for more/better service.
(I'd also add that there's a separate study of high-speed rail between Richmond and Raleigh, and that service would ALSO use Main St Station as the main Richmond station. It'd also move the Petersburg Station out of that godawful Ettrick location and to somewhere else closer to Petersburg.)
Saturday, June 19, 2010 2:28:56 PM by Anonymous
Does anyone here know where/how to find ridership numbers __by train__ to compare Main Street against Staples Mill for __only__ the trains that stop at both stations? Those would be NE Regionals 66, 67, 83, 94, 95, 99, and 194.
McDonnell has proven he's averse to public transit projects (stripping Metro funds), so I don't see this getting resolved anytime soon.
All the NE corridor cities have a downtown station. That's the only way rail will thrive. Sorry to the west-enders, but Staples Mill won't cut it.
Union station in DC, 30th St in Phila, even Wilmington Station in the tiny Delaware city they all have downtown stations. It makes sense. Bad time for capital investment such as this, but it will be neccessary to have a successful rail program south of DC.
Friday, June 18, 2010 2:34:51 PM by RVA_Source
I am glad to see that the comments from readers are trying to hold Style to what I thought were their ideals. I thought Style was in favor of smart growth, new urbanism, and promoting a revitalized downtown.
Galuzka's article reads like an op-ed instead of news reporting, especially the last paragraph. It sounds like it was written by a suburban developer promoting sprawling expansion into the hinterlands over downtown life. Are we to believe that the editors of Style want everybody to just drive our cars everywhere if public transportation options are costly.
The article fails to point out that the $600 mil is the price to get high speed rail sometime in the future. I heard the price to actually get the Norfolk train to Main St is much less. Even so, the $600 mil projects don't need to all happen right now. They could happen piece by piece over a period of many years to steadily increase quality of service to Main St. Then maybe we could get those 20 trains through Main St. (BTW, Main St ridership on the measly two trains a day has more than doubled in the past two years!)
I also wonder why Style feels the need to bash the RTD so often? Perhaps the fact that the meeting was in the RTD bldg and Silvestri's involvement in the group is news, but there is no need to slam them on other things. Insulting the bldg's architecture is a juvenile 'zing' that has no relevance. But since you bring it up, I am glad they built in that area that needs more economic development help. Gunmetal grey is better than abandoned blocks of nothingness.
Plus, I was in a conversation on the issue, and a reliable source told me that a reporter was not "summoned" but rather that the RTD's Baque was walking through the lobby when Drake was walking out and he asked why she was in the building. Supposedly, the RTD's coverage flowed from there.
Sounds to me like Style may be mad that they were scooped. Maybe they should attend the group's meetings in the future? I bet they are open to the public.
So... Why did Style abandon their pro-downtown ideals? Maybe it is because they had to in order to adhere to a "higher" ideal - taking shots at business, govt, and the RTD?
Did it occur that maybe our pro-downtown arguments have finally forced govt and business to act in favor of the downtown? If so, I would hope Style would praise them, not chase them back to developing along 288, or in Varina, or in Goochland farms.
Thursday, June 17, 2010 11:24:57 AM by TravlinMan
Main Street station is a case of "if you fix it they will come".
Staples Mills is inconveniently located for me. It's also a shabby, badly organized space.
Regardless of whether you use Staples Mills or Main Street you're stuck with CSX treating passengers as stand-by traffic. If service from Main Street were minimally reliable and frequent I'd use it instead of I95.
Thursday, June 17, 2010 11:17:22 AM by Anonymous
Points: 1) Comparing rider numbers is inaccurate when only 4 trains daily leave Main Street, 20 leave Staples Mill. You'd have to compare the rider numbers for those 4 only, Main Street against Staples Mill. When people have a choice, which station do they really prefer for matters of convenience of public transit, location, shops & restaurants near the station, etc.?
2) If CSX upgrades the S-line for the Norfolk train, it will allow 8 more trains to stop at Main Street: The Silver Meteor and Silver Star to/from Florida, the Palmetto to/from Georgia, and the Carolinian to/from Charlotte.
3) On-time performance: In the article, what does this figure of 52.4 percent refer to? Is it city pairs within Virginia? City pairs one city in VA, the other out-of-state? Long distance trains? Northeast Regionals?
4) Upgrade cost of $591.6 million: Is this just CSX inflating the estimate because they don't to fool with passenger trains on the S-line?
I ride trains and busses a LOT. Main Street is way more convenient to people living downtown and people who use public transportation. GRTC service to Staples Millis limited to an hourly bus 8am-6pm weekdays, no weekends. Cab fare Staples Mill to downtown is about $35-40. The Number 6 GRTC stops in front of Main Street Station, and within a few blocks walk are 6 more routes at 14th & Main, and about 5 five more at 18th & Broad. I would ride Amtrak a lot more than Greyhound if more trains stopped at Main Street. As it is, Staples Mill is too hard to get to .
Wednesday, June 16, 2010 4:28:04 PM by anon
Get CSX and Norfolk Southern and whatever else to clean up Acca trainyard and end the stupid delays.
If you look at just about every time table for trains leaving Main Street or Staples Mill going to Union Station, it takes at least 30 minutes longer from down town. You can dress it up all you want, but I'm still leaving Staples Mill.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010 8:11:51 PM by Oaktwin
Fred is 150% correct. Main St. Station is more convenient for many of the people currently using Staples Mill. Having only two trains a day travel through Main St., is a set up for failure. The Staples Mill Station is a disgrace to any city but particularly to a capital city.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010 3:15:27 PM by Anonymous
Over a billion dollars spent on downtown on the likes of the Canal Walk, Convention Center, and Center Stage, and now we can't get this vital transportation need filled?
Tuesday, June 15, 2010 1:34:08 PM by FredInRVA
"The ultimate question, however, is whether Main Street Station is worth more than a half-billion dollars to upgrade tracks for upgraded service that averages a meager 2,000 passengers each month. That level is four times less than monthly ridership in Charlottesville, a much smaller city, and 10 times less than the Staples Mill station."
Gee, maybe if we made those improvements so you had a lot more trains coming through Main Street Station, a lot of those 250,000 people who use that dingy, cramped sorry excuse for a train station on Staples Mill would use the much nicer Main Street Station instead.
