Virginia Planning for High-Speed Rail Between Richmond and D.C.

The pieces of the still-speculative Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor—connecting Atlanta to Washington, D.C.—are starting to take shape. The latest leg to come into focus would connect Richmond to D.C.

December 21, 2016, 9am PST | James Brasuell | @CasualBrasuell

Train 52, the northbound Auto Train with AMTK95 & AMTK46, in Ashland, Virginia.

John H Gray

Flickr

"Faster, more frequent trains between DC and Richmond could be on the way," reports Stephen Repetski. The improved train service would come as a result of new tracks as well as changes to existing tracks for the DC2RVA Rail Improvement Project under consideration by the state of Virginia.

"The overall goal is to add nine daily round-trip trains from North Carolina or Norfolk/Newport News that would travel up through DC to Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor including Baltimore, Philly, and New York," according to Repetski. The project would require $5.2 billion to make the improvements necessary to achieve those goals.

Repetski notes that the DC2RVA Rail Improvement Project is "part of a larger network slowly being studied from DC down to Atlanta," known as the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor. The D.C. to Richmond portion of the high-speed rail corridor is in the second phase of the project.

The article includes a lot more detail about the DC2RVA project, including some notes about the shortcomings of the project as currently envisioned. For instance, according to Repetski,"Virginia is looking to make trains operate at up to a maximum of 90 miles per hour in the corridor, which is still lower than what Amtrak's regular Northeast Regional trains can operate at between DC and New York."

Full Story:

New DC to Richmond tracks would mean faster, more frequent Amtrak and VRE

Published on Tuesday, December 13, 2016 in Greater Greater Washington