You won't find the Viaduct Building by looking for a viaduct. But if your mind's eye can take you back to the early 1980s or before - or if you have an active imagination - you can envision the viaduct that used to carry Raleigh's West Martin Street up and over the nexus of rail lines on the western edge of downtown. The connection fed into Boylan Heights near the south end of the Boylan Avenue Bridge.
Dillon Supply, the steel, equipment and industrial products company whose brick complex anchored the city's warehouse district, owned the Viaduct Building. As long as a football field and with a portion that looks to be as much as 50 feet high, it sat lengthwise beside the viaduct's eastern end.
The viaduct was demolished nearly 30 years ago, but its upward slope is still traced along the vacant building's side, past Martin Street's slightly rising stump of an end.
To certain eyes, the Viaduct Building is a post-industrial curiosity, with Dillon Supply having left town several years ago and with the warehouse district now sporting more galleries, bars and ad agencies than, say, steel fabricators.
But its uniqueness in the downtown landscape has to do with its proximity to those railroad tracks. It is the only building within what's called the Boylan Wye, a three-sided track formation at the heart of Raleigh's rail network. And that makes for a very strategic location indeed.
Who knows how long it might be before plans now taking shape could bear fruit, but it's possible to foresee a time when the area in and around the Wye becomes downtown Raleigh's busiest, most attractive entry point. It could become a magnet for business, a showcase for visitors, a place to which people would gravitate for the excitement and major-city buzz.
If that happens, it will be in large part because the City Council hit the bull's-eye last week with its unanimous support for rehabbing the Viaduct Building into the centerpiece of a new transit hub.
The state's Rail Division already has drafted an impressive study into the project's feasibility. (It's viewable as a .pdf file; you can find it by googling "Viaduct Building Raleigh.") The study shows how the building could be converted into a spacious rail terminal and how the surrounding tracks could be reconfigured to handle several kinds of rail traffic.
A key goal would be to replace and upgrade the current, cramped Amtrak station on Cabarrus Street. That station is simply not up to snuff for handling the load from eight daily passenger trains - a load that has made Raleigh a busier stop than Charlotte, Atlanta, Orlando or Miami.
The state's investments in bigger and better stations, as well as more frequent Raleigh-to-Charlotte service, help explain why more people are taking the train rather than battling traffic on the interstates or dealing with airport hassles.
But Amtrak is only part of the capital's emerging rail picture. The state-owned N.C. Railroad, proprietor of the Triangle's busiest rail corridor, has looked hard at gearing up commuter trains through downtown. Wake County's transit plan also sees commuter rail as a sooner-rather-than-later option, along with expanded bus service.
The thinking is that if voters approve a half-cent increase in the sales tax dedicated to transit improvements, Wake (in a partnership with Durham) could finance commuter trains between West Durham and Garner, with downtown Raleigh being a prime destination.
On the Garner end, there would be a stop with a large park-and-ride lot at the Greenfield Business Park near where I-40 and U.S. 70 cross. Another stop would be in Garner's own reinvigorated downtown. With all the growth in southeast Wake and neighboring northwest Johnston County, many people from Garner, Cleveland, Clayton and environs surely would appreciate a means of getting to work in Raleigh or Research Triangle Park that didn't involve bucking traffic jams.
An attractive transit complex featuring the transformed Viaduct Building - with well-designed walkways and platforms, and with convenient connections to buses that would take people where they needed to go in the city - would be a downtown game-changer.
And as to the shoulder-shruggers who say that no conceivable kind of rail service could make a dent in the region's highway traffic congestion, it's doubtless true that our main roads at rush hour will always be crowded. But a well-coordinated system of trains and buses would help keep traffic jams from becoming worse, especially as the population keeps growing.
Beyond the mobility benefits, public transit has a proven record as a kind of economic force multiplier. In city after city, new rail lines have triggered development projects taking advantage of access to stations.
It may not have been the model by which the Triangle took shape, but it's a model that has worked elsewhere. For us, it could mean more jobs and more efficient land use. So bringing the Viaduct Building out of mothballs could be the key to something really big.
