The Raleigh City Council backed away today from taking a stand on any of the state’s proposed downtown routes for a new fast-train line from Raleigh to Richmond, Va., and it asked state officials to add other possible routes to their study.
The council asked the state Department of Transportation to analyze three alternative train paths – two suggested by residents last week and a third broached Tuesday by council member Thomas Crowder.
Each of the three new ideas involves a long railroad bridge that would carry high-speed passenger trains high over Capital Boulevard. Crowder suggested running the elevated trains north and south, parallel to the busy thoroughfare, as part of an expansive downtown development project.
The alternatives sketched last week by groups of residents would move the trains from the west side of Capital to the east side, on a long curving bridge either just north or just south of Peace Street.
Council member Russell Stephenson said the new options looked better than DOT’s proposals either to run the trains north along the west side of Capital, through a Norfolk Southern rail yard, or through a CSX yard on the east side.
“It doesn’t matter to me which one they choose,” Stephenson said in an interview. “Either one is going to have significantly fewer impacts, it appears to me, than [DOT’s] NC1/NC2 option or the NC3 option.”
The Norfolk Southern option had looked like a heavy favorite – backed by city planners and a citizen task force – until Five Points neighborhood residents organized their opposition.
They worried that train noise and vibration would rattle their homes, erode their property values and drown out their sidewalk conversations. The Five Points opposition dominated a city council public hearing last week.
Mayor Charles Meeker expressed no sympathy for their complaints about train noise. He said he hears noisy freight trains and quieter passenger trains every day from his home in Boylan Heights, 200 yards from a busy downtown rail intersection known as the Boylan Wye.
The state’s high-speed rail proposal would silence the warning horns sounded by trains as they approach rail crossings, Meeker said, because all crossings would be closed or converted to bridges.
“Whichever way this goes, we’re not going to have any more horns, so there’s going to be less noise overall than we’ve had in the past,” Meeker said.
The recommendations approved by the city council included Meeker’s suggestion that Norfolk Southern move its freight yard out of the city if DOT chooses that route for its new passenger trains.
That idea brought a rebuff from a Norfolk Southern official.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Durwood Laughinghouse, the railroad’s North Carolina vice president, said after the council vote. “We just cannot locate outside this area, and that’s been our position all along.
“It looks like they were trying to satisfy everybody with everything, instead of taking a real position on the future. And who knows what’s going to happen.”
Read more: http://blogs.newsobserver.com/crosstown/raleigh-council-wants-study-of-more-train-routes-but-wont-recommend-one#ixzz0yskERpy8
