Moving those trains through Raleigh, N.C.

You get history by the earful when you ride around Raleigh with railroaders. And a little prehistory, too, the News & Observer reports.

"See how the Norfolk
Southern corridor hugs the edge of the old river bed through here," said
Allan Paul, rail operations director for the state Department of
Transportation. He stood on the kudzu-clad bank that separates tracks below from
shady stub-end streets above in Raleigh’s handsome old Glenwood Brooklyn
neighborhood.

We nodded our heads,
tentatively. Yes, we see. What river bed?

"There was a river
through here many millions of years ago," he said. "It dried up and
is today Pigeon House Creek."

Paul was a tour guide for
members of a task force that will advise the Raleigh City Council on a planned
multimodal depot for fast intercity trains and beefed-up transit service. As
Raleigh considers historic upgrades for a rail network that has been shoehorned
into the downtown grid since the 19th century, the city faces a mix of modern
and recycled challenges.

Passenger trains thrived in
Raleigh in the early 20th century. In 1942, Raleigh’s depot was inadequate for
the hugely popular Streamliner, which pulled 20 coaches from New York to
Florida. A forerunner of CSX Transportation was impatient for the city to build
a bigger station.

"Seaboard Air Line got
fed up with the city of Raleigh not being able to decide where its new rail
station was going to go," Paul said. "Does this sound familiar?"

Seaboard built its own
depot, now home to a garden center, Logan Trading Co. Flowering plants sit on a
passenger platform that was built 1,600 feet long – even longer than the
1,200-foot platform planned for the new Union Station on Hargett Street.

Today there are parallel
plans for squeezing more tracks into downtown Raleigh, to serve different kinds
of travelers in one of the nation’s fastest-growing regions.

A Triangle Transit network
would probably use electric light-rail trains that could travel on tracks
parallel to existing heavy-rail tracks or, like old trolleys, could run on
tracks down Morgan and Harrington streets. Diesel locomotives would pull
high-speed Amtrak trains for intercity travelers and rush-hour commuter trains
for local workers and students.

They would share a narrow
corridor with increasingly busy freight trains, on tracks that slip over and
under Raleigh’s busiest streets – scarcely noticed by city residents.

"Food, lumber,
recycled oil–you guys would be amazed at the stuff these railroads bring into
Raleigh," Paul said.

He said CSXT plans to
double the capacity of its mile-long freight yard on the opposite shore of that
ancient river, east of Capital Boulevard. And on the west side of Capital,
Norfolk Southern’s freight yard has seen a 20 percent increase in traffic this
year, said Durwood Laughinghouse, the railroad’s North Carolina vice president.

As Paul and Laughinghouse
explained Norfolk Southern operations, a train rumbled into the yard with
phosphates, ethanol, building products and open hoppers of cement. Four
refrigerated railcars were parked nearby, packed with McDonald’s French fries.

"They have to be
delivered on time, and they have to be watched on the refrigeration to make
sure the French fries stay frozen," Laughinghouse said. "They come
here from Idaho and Washington, and it’s a very delicate operation."

We don’t see the fries and
phosphates, but these freight trains matter to motorists.

"For every one of
Durwood’s hoppers out here, he’s taking eight trucks off the road," Paul
said. "If these materials had to travel [the entire distance] to merchants
and residents via truck, you would have all sorts of added congestion on our
roads."

The railroad plans now
moving forward will bring more benefits to the city, he said. "At the end
of the day when you’ve got construction finished, you’ll have a much better
rail network through town that has even less impact on the community, with less
noise and less obstruction at intersections."