Raleigh-to-Richmond rail project receives $1B federal grant

A passenger rail route between Raleigh, North Carolina, and Richmond will receive a $1 billion U.S. Department of Transportation grant, U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-North Carolina, announced Tuesday.

The approximate 162-mile route will be along the currently out-of-service CSX Transportation “S-Line” as part of a Southeast corridor to connect North Carolina with Virginia, Washington, D.C., and the Northeast corridor. Trains on the route could travel up to 110 miles per hour.

“This $1 billion grant for North Carolina to make progress on the Raleigh-to-Richmond rail line is a big win for economic development in the region,” Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, said in a statement.

In June 2022, the transportation department’s Federal Railroad Administration announced an up to $57.9 million grant to the North Carolina Department of Transportation for the project as part of $368 million in funding awarded across 46 projects in the U.S. The grant to North Carolina was to support surveys and preliminary engineering for the Raleigh to Richmond (R2R) Corridor Program, which is a joint venture between North Carolina’s transportation department and the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority.

NCDOT and Amtrak will provide a 20% funding match to the $1 billion grant. The Federal Railroad Administration will work with NCDOT and VPRA to establish a phased funding agreement.

The eventual rail route will be state-owned. In 2020, Virginia signed an agreement to buy 75 miles of S-Line right-of-way between Ridgeway, North Carolina, and Petersburg from CSX Transportation for $525 million, paid over three installments. NCDOT has the option to purchase the S-Line right-of-way between Raleigh and Ridgeway according to a June 2022 news release from VPRA.

For fiscal 2023 — which ran from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023 — Amtrak Virginia served a record 1.26 million passengers. The previous record, set in fiscal 2015, was about 894,000.