With riders coming back, Amtrak resumes Piedmont train service in North Carolina
The state will resume its Piedmont rail service between Raleigh and Charlotte on Monday, as demand for passenger trains rebounds in North Carolina.
The addition of a daily round trip of the Piedmont will mark the first time the Piedmont and Amtrak’s Carolinian have operated between the two cities at the same time since early April. The Carolinian runs daily between Charlotte, the Triangle and the Northeast, ending in New York City.
With people ordered to stay home to stop the spread of coronavirus this spring, demand for rail travel in North Carolina dropped 95% by mid-April, said Katie Trout, spokeswoman for the N.C Department of Transportation’s rail division.
Since then, people have gradually started to travel again, Trout said.
“We are seeing a growing demand for service as folks look to safely get back out,” she wrote in an email. “As things have slowly begun opening back up, the Carolinian is operating at around 50% of 2019 levels and is currently one of the best-performing trains in Amtrak’s system.”
NCDOT and Amtrak were operating three daily round trips of the Piedmont between Raleigh and Charlotte before the coronavirus pandemic. Two round trips were suspended in late March because of falling demand, and the third was stopped in May, when the Carolinian was resumed after a hiatus of more than a month.
With growing ridership, NCDOT and Amtrak have added passenger cars to the Carolinian, which leaves Charlotte headed north at 6:45 a.m. and passes through the Triangle headed south at about 5:30 p.m.
Resuming the Piedmont will give people more options and make it easier for Triangle residents to make a day-trip to Charlotte, Trout said.
Starting Monday, the Piedmont will leave Raleigh at 6:30 a.m. and arrive in Charlotte at 9:40 a.m., with stops in Cary, Durham, Burlington, Greensboro, High Point, Salisbury and Kannapolis. The return train will leave Charlotte at 3:15 p.m. and arrive in Raleigh at 6:26 p.m.
Like airlines and airports, Amtrak has taken steps to try to make people feel comfortable traveling with strangers again. In addition to more stringent cleaning of rail cars and stations, Amtrak requires everyone on platforms and in stations and trains to wear masks or facial coverings and is limiting the number of riders per train so passengers can remain physically apart from each other.
A recent study of passengers on Chinese high-speed trains found that the chances of contracting the virus went up the longer and closer someone sat near an infected person. The study, which looked at 2,334 infected travelers and 72,093 people who came in close contact with them on a train, found that the average rate of transmission was about a third of 1%.
“Our study shows that although there is an increased risk of COVID-19 transmission on trains, a person’s seat location and travel time in relation to an infectious person can make a big difference as to whether it is passed on,” wrote the study’s lead author, Shengjie Lai, a research fellow at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.
This week, in an article about the risk of contracting the virus on the subway, The New York Times reported that efforts to trace hundreds of clusters of coronavirus infections in Paris, Tokyo and Austria found none of them were linked to public transportation.
State to buy new passenger rail cars
The resumption of Piedmont service comes as NCDOT is taking stock of the engines and rail cars it owns to determine what it will keep and what it might sell.
NCDOT has decided to accept an $80 million federal grant to buy six new locomotives and 13 passenger cars. When the grant was announced in late May, NCDOT officials said they wanted to evaluate the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on passenger rail before accepting the money.
The latest grant follows an earlier $77 million federal grant NCDOT received for 13 passenger cars for the Piedmont, meaning the state will eventually have a fleet of 26 new cars. The cars would allow NCDOT to follow through on a plan to add a fourth round trip of the Piedmont in 2023, to coincide with the opening of a new Amtrak station in Uptown Charlotte.
The cars will be the first new passenger coaches NCDOT has ever owned. All 19 coaches in the Piedmont fleet — 14 passenger cars and five baggage/cafe cars — were built in the 1950s and 1960s. NCDOT bought them used and had them refurbished, something it planned to do with nine rail cars it bought from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus after the circus shut down in 2017.
The federal grants mean NCDOT probably won’t need the circus train cars now. In a bill passed this summer, the General Assembly gave the department until Nov. 1 to develop a 10-year plan for its rail service and equipment and then put up for sale any rail cars it doesn’t need or plan to donate to the N.C. Transportation Museum in Spencer.
