Charlotte to Kings Mountain is a low hanging fruit which can be a showcase of an early success.
The issue is that, as-is, they're still dead ends. An additional train (or two) per day might do better than existing service, but it's still a weak stub-end in both cases when there's a natural endpoint that makes sense for both of them (Columbia for Hamlet and Norfolk/Richmond [preferably Norfolk] for Weldon).Charlotte to Kings Mountain is a low hanging fruit which can be a showcase of an early success.
The Morehead City - Raleigh is really Morehead City - Goldsboro, since Goldsboro - Raleigh is part of the Wilmington Raleigh segment.
It seems to me that the Hamlet - Raleigh and Weldon - Raleigh both require just some station and turning facility at the end point away from Raleigh. The routes are already served by at least one train a day.
The Charlotte - Columbia thing does not appear in the NC State proposed route map so it is no surprise that no one put together a proposal. Indeed no proposal that involved South Carolina as a terminal point appears to have been made as far as I know.
Here is the NC State map from NCDOT:
I'm a bit taken aback with an additional Tennessee proposal that made the initial cut ─ Nashville - Memphis. It was one of nine additional routes announced Wednesday, Dec. 6:
Unless they are doing two separate routes, they'll have to decide between going through Macon or going through Athens and Augusta. The former would be a shorter distance but the latter would serve a larger population.
I feel your pain and empathize! Although the Twin Cities and a couple towns in eastern Minnesota would benefit from several of the Wisconsin proposals, MnDOT's MN-specific proposals were almost entirely left out. Only the Northern Lights Express to Duluth received anything. Nothing for the key North-South corridor from St. Paul to Kansas City via Des Moines. Nothing for service to Fargo (extension of the upcoming second train, most likely), or Sioux Falls, SD. But as with Utah, it's Minnesota's fault! Weak rail planning and community support, with a DOT that, while they do decent things with active transportation, is biased against passenger rail and has done the bare minimum forever.
They could probably do several expansions for the time and trouble it takes to set up a new line. Maybe that is part of the reason.
Which ones are those?
but not a detailed description of how things get done.
Posting this again since it may have gotten buried in the shuffle in the original posting by @lordsigma upthread.
Yes, exactly! RPA's thoughts in their email from today on what Corridor ID as a program and what the studies will do puts it very clearly: "Corridor ID will act as a pipeline for developing projects. It will help advance routes to a stage where they are ready to break ground, while maintaining the ability to add additional corridors to the pipeline in future iterations."I'm picturing this as a conveyor belt of projects. My understanding is none of this is a "one-off" but just this year's tranche of multi-year programs.* The projects that got real money (tens of millions to a few billions) now were either underway or shovel-ready. The projects that got half-million-dollar planning grants will hopefully be shovel-ready to get real money next year or the year after. And if the programs continue, a new set of planning grants will be issued at the same time to create shovel-ready plans for future years. And so on.
Yes, studies often don't result in actual projects. But no project has been done in recent decades without a study. A necessary but not sufficient condition, as the logicians say. "Just build it" is a nice slogan for High Speed Rail Association
Advocates and politicians have to work to move these projects down the road, but cynicism or resignation because one's favored project (which in many cases got a lot of letters of support from chambers of commerce and county councils but has no formal plan) didn't get real money in the first year isn't helpful to that work.
*Absent Congress rescinding the programs. Vote accordingly in '24!.
Studies are necessary but you could argue we should be on a crisis footing for the environment, and establish a large federal agency to do the planning, rather than consultants. Might require a lot of visas to India for new engineers. Or, just that studies should not take so long, and best practices involve a faster template for completion.
Thank you! To your point of disconnected studies, I notice that some of the grants are to different agencies for essentially the same project:
Re: Eau Claire, you're right about it giving them a "seat at the big boy table," so to speak. I can speak to Eau Claire, being from MN--the funding situation as announced is fairly confusing to even the average Amtrak rider. There's a coalition (West Central Wisconsin Rail Coalition) that has long advocated for a more regional, almost commuter-type (not quite, but they bill it more as that in some ways) rail service just from Eau Claire to St. Paul. And because the squeaky wheel gets the grease, they received funding to finally conduct a real study of what this service--which I've seen them propose somewhere having at least 4 round trips per day--could look like.
