Nancy Mullin fears the worst.
And her fears about a plan for high-speed trains are spreading fast through her handsome, leafy neighborhood near Raleigh's Five Points.
The Five Points Citizens Advisory Council voted 81-0 Thursday night to condemn a proposal that would route new passenger trains through the Norfolk Southern freight yard between Capital Boulevard and the Five Points area.
The vote was an angry endorsement of warnings from Mullin and others that train noise and vibration would rattle their homes, erode their property values and drown out their sidewalk conversations.
You can expect to hear these alarms amplified tonight, when the Raleigh City Council holds a public hearing on three alternatives for the downtown path of a proposed 162-mile track from Raleigh to Richmond.
"Homeowners aren't going to receive any compensation for reductions in our property values," Mullin, 59, told her neighbors before Thursday's vote. "Or for potential damage that vibration and construction or other aspects of this project might cause to our foundations, our structures, to old trees or our famous hundred-year-old terracotta sewer pipes."
The state Department of Transportation is considering options called NC1 and NC2 that would run trains through a CSX freight yard on the east side of Capital Boulevard.
City transportation planners and a citizen task force have endorsed NC3, the proposal dreaded in Five Points, which would route the new trains along Capital's west side.
All three options would disrupt car and foot traffic between downtown Raleigh and the booming Glenwood South district. NC1/NC2 would close West and Harrington streets and make Jones Street a four-block viaduct over the tracks. NC3 would close Jones but not West and Harrington.
An informal group of engineers and activists is floating a fourth alternative: sending the new trains soaring above Capital Boulevard on a five-block viaduct, lifting off from North Street near West and touching down on the CSX tracks north of Peace Street.
Fears in Five Points
There was barely a ripple of concern around Five Points in June when the three official options were unveiled in a 666-page DOT study.
But after DOT failed to provide answers for residents' questions or to send representatives to Five Points meetings, Mullin and some neighbors started their own research.
"We Googled information about the impact" of new rail lines on property values, Mullin said in an interview. "We went on websites of other places where high-speed rail has gone through."
A school consultant who moved from Boston to Raleigh a year ago, Mullin warned that street closings would leave Five Points residents "landlocked," cut off from easy access to other parts of the city.
She cited the Federal Railroad Administration for her warning that trains would be as loud as jackhammers, shaking homes as far as six blocks away.
Eric Lamb, the city's transportation services manager, was skeptical of the dire consequences Mullin and other critics laid out in neighborhood newsletters and on a new website, Dont Railroad Historic FivePoints.com .
"I think there's a lot of misinformation floating around," said Lamb, who has endorsed NC3. For the past century, he said, Five Points has lived with the noise and vibration of Norfolk Southern locomotives shoving rail cars together and assembling freight trains.
"It's already adjacent to an industrial area, an existing rail line and rail yard," Lamb said. "So it is not clear that there would be a degradation of property values compared to existing conditions today."
Mullin's arguments drew strength from the summer-long suffering of Five Points residents during a noisy and disruptive street repair project on Glenwood Avenue.
"There have been days we couldn't figure out how to get out of our neighborhood because the streets were closed," she said.
"We are more than six blocks from Glenwood" at her house on Aycock Street, Mullin said. "And we can feel the effects of the jackhammers now.
"And the trains are going to be a lot closer, and they're going to be forever."
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The Raleigh City Council will hold a hearing tonight to gather public comment before adopting the city's recommendations on a state Department of Transportation proposal to build a new high-speed rail line from Raleigh to Richmond, Va. The hearing starts at 7 p.m. in council chambers at the Upchurch Government Complex, 222 W. Hargett St.
The discussion is expected to focus on alternative paths for the new rail line between Jones Street and Wake Forest Road in downtown Raleigh. Two alternatives called NC1 and NC2 would follow CSX tracks on the east side of Capital Boulevard, while NC3 would follow Norfolk Southern tracks on the west side of Capital.
DOT is accepting public comment until Sept. 10 on the Raleigh-to-Richmond route proposed as part of the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor. Learn more and post your comments at sehsr.org.
