Amtrak stop in Hillsborough gains support

HILLSBOROUGH -- Suddenly, there is real momentum behind the drive to establish a passenger train depot in northern Orange County, two years after it was the object of a local coffee-shop petition.

Hillsborough residents hear the whistles of four Amtrak trains rolling through town every day, one of them bound for New York. By midsummer there will be six trains running daily between Raleigh and Charlotte. They'll make seven stops along the way.

But not here. Not yet.

"This is a main line that passes through town," said Tom Campanella, a UNC-Chapel Hill professor who serves on Hillsborough's planning board. "We're literally sitting next to a jugular vein here. All we need to do is tap into it."

Campenella chairs a local task force that has been asked to recommend the best spot for a Hillsborough rail stop.

At a public input session this afternoon, he will outline pros and cons of seven sites and ask for community feedback.

It's an open house from 4 to 9 p.m. at the Big Barn Convention Center, 388 Ja Max Drive. Formal presentations are scheduled at 5:30 and 7 p.m.

Local leaders drew encouragement last year from an economic study by Amtrak and the state Department of Transportation. A Hillsborough stop would boost ticket revenue enough to trim the state's Amtrak subsidy by a projected $56,000 a year.

To protect one potential site for a train station, the Hillsborough town board agreed last summer to pay $600,000 for 20 acres known as the Collins property, just south of downtown.

Along with the Collins property, the task force is looking at six other potential locations. They range from Efland, west of Hillsborough, to University Station east of town -- where a rail junction links the main east-west track to a rail spur that runs south to Chapel Hill.

The Collins property is among four sites within a short walk of Hillsborough's historic downtown. Another is a gravel lot at the foot of Nash Street, where a local rail depot stood until 1964, when the old Southern Railway ended service here.