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Price tag for Roanoke passenger service increases
42 round trips a day on the bus and $95.800,000 ? Why the heck would the state pay for Amtrak? The bus seems to be fine. Im all for trains but this case? No brainer!
I think the expectation is that with 42 people willing to take the bus already, there will be a lot more ready to take the train when it starts…
I would take the train over a bus any day.
Britt Reid III, you are another Matthew Nochols; take your buses and shove them. Travelers would rather ride the train than cramped, smelly buses.
When the Vermonter was halted for three months for trackwork and a bus substituted, ridership declined by half. That’s pretty solid scientific evidence that we can expect ridership to double when the bus connection becomes a train.
OK, 84 passengers a day for almost $100,000,000 of our tax dollars? That is still criminal. Someone should be jailed if this is done. What is wrong with this country that the government can waste our money doing these things? I think the people voted in the recent election and these wasteful projects were rejected. They threw the bums out. Hopefully the new Congress witll stop this foolishness and sanity will prevail.
I’m not privy to where the money is going but I’d be willing to bet a very large portion of it is going to related, but not railroad items, i.e, community infrastructure. NS might be getting a bit of a windfall on upgrading their line, though the liability from passenger operations might be an offset to that and it does take more to get a priority passenger train through a mix of freight traffic, if they give it the priority it should have.
All you guys complaining about the cost ever stop to think about what the road in front of your house cost?!
Trains magazine should dump this comment section as it’s not helpful to anyone. As for Robert J McGuire (Main) comment, maybe they should dump the expanded Main service and use it to fund the Roanoke expansion where people appreciate trains. People like McGuire only see the small picture and what does he know about expanded train service in Virginia anyway. After the train service has expanded to Roanoke it will pick up thousands of traveling students plus faculty from Virginia Tech and Radford University. Yes NS drove the cost of this project way up by ripping up an existing rail passenger rail platform and extensive rail crossover network and using the lame excuse that it interfered with freight service. Of course it had only been at that location for 150 years and functioned just fine with mixed freight and passenger service before.