More rail could be coming to Southwest Virginia

TRANSIT OPINION By Wyatt Gordon (The Virginia Mercury) March 22, 2021

A version of this article first appeared in the Virginia Mercury.

Although the General Assembly approved an $83.5 million budget amendment this session, in part to extend passenger rail service deeper into Southwest Virginia, that doesn’t change the fact that there isn’t a train station or even a platform in the New River Valley. However, legislation from local lawmakers that is heading to the governor’s desk aims to fix that by creating a new regional body to raise money for the facility. ... If signed by the governor, SB1212 from Sen. John Edwards, D-Roanoke and HB1893 from Del. Chris Hurst, D-Blacksburg, would create a New River Valley Passenger Rail Station Authority encompassing the members of Virginia’s Planning District 4. The resulting partnership between the City of Radford, the counties of Floyd, Giles, Montgomery, and Pulaski as well as the three universities in the area would be “authorized to enter into revenue-sharing agreements and to issue revenue bonds” towards the goal of building a platform or a station to serve the region.

Localities lead the way

As state officials hammer out the final details of the deal with Norfolk Southern to extend Amtrak service beyond Roanoke, the new authority could prove a critical local partner. ... “The station authority will be so helpful because they will be a regional group that will be able to pool resources, potentially own property and work together to get the station built,” said Jennifer Mitchell, director of the Department of Rail and Public Transportation. “We haven’t worked out a formal partnership agreement with the localities yet, so having an authority out there would be beneficial so we can work with one entity to organize the surrounding amenities.”

The New River Valley Rail Station Authority will also be the first of its kind in the commonwealth. Previous passenger rail expansions never enjoyed such a coordinated regional effort to roll out the red carpet to new train service. For a line extension from Petersburg to Hampton Roads the City of Norfolk took the lead. When passenger rail came to Roanoke, the state created the platform and left the city responsible for building the station. ... “The idea of a new station grew out of the localities. They wanted an authority that has the ability to raise funds to build and to operate a rail passenger station,” Edwards said. “So far, they’ve raised around $360,000 a year — 78% of that from Montgomery County, the towns of Blacksburg and Christiansburg and Virginia Tech. The other localities make up the rest. That would be enough to build and operate a $4.2 million station over time.”

Without such deep regional cooperation, the New River Valley would never be able to afford a new passenger rail station, said Larry Hincker, spokesman for New River Valley Passenger Rail, an advocacy coalition that grew out of the Blacksburg Partnership. “If you look at rail stations along the way like Lynchburg and Roanoke, they’re all in municipalities that have the financial wherewithal to build out the rail platforms and the station. If you look at the New River Valley, however, you see that there isn’t a single locality that has the financial capacity to build out the actual station and the platform on its own. Therefore we need to create an authority to organize this and to do that we need the General Assembly’s permission.”

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Wyatt Gordon is a correspondent for the Virginia Mercury via a grant from the Coalition for Smarter Growth and the Piedmont Environmental Council. He was formerly GGWash's Virginia Correspondent. He's a born-and-raised Richmonder with a master's in Urban Planning from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and a bachelor's in International Political Economy from American University. He's written for the Times of India, Nairobi News, Style Weekly, and RVA Magazine.