Idle tracks run from north Meck to uptown. Will commuters ever ride the Red Line?
It’s coveted commuter rail that for more than two decades has existed only on paper: the 25-mile Red Line, as it is now known, from traffic-choked northern Mecklenburg County to uptown Charlotte.
The tracks are already in place, running through downtown Davidson, Cornelius and Huntersville before ending in weeds off North Graham Street in Charlotte. Only about one freight train a week rattles down the once-busy tracks, which the Charlotte Area Transit System says occupy an ideal corridor between northern suburbs and the city.
Tantalizing as they are for commuter rail, the tracks are owned by Norfolk Southern Corp., which refuses to share what it calls the O Line. But despite little apparent progress toward ending the stalemate, CATS insists the Red Line isn’t dead.
Cornelius resident Scott McClellan, who commutes to his uptown bank job by bus, ponders why he has to sit in traffic when “this empty line is just sitting there.”
That Norfolk Southern can’t be induced to share the track “just seems like a story that’s accepted as fact, like gravity,” McClellan said. Considering that Norfolk Southern has a contractual agreement with a state-owned entity, the N.C. Railroad Co., he said, it seems like the situation could be resolved.
Norfolk Southern leases rights to the 317 miles of track between Charlotte and the coast that are owned by the N.C. Railroad Co., a private corporation that is wholly owned by the state.
Included in the lease is a heavily-used freight line between Greensboro and Charlotte that also carries Amtrak passenger trains. The O Line, which Norfolk Southern owns, connects Winston-Salem and Charlotte as it cuts through northern Mecklenburg and serves as a backup to the vital Greensboro-to-Charlotte line.
For at least five years, CATS has said Norfolk Southern doesn’t want to commit to sharing the O Line until it is assured of long-term access to the Greensboro-to-Charlotte track owned by the state.
The company wouldn’t comment on the O Line or any talks with CATS for this article, telling The Observer it “does not have any information to share on the matter at this time.”
It’s unclear what long-term access Norfolk Southern seeks for use of the Greensboro-to-Charlotte corridor. The railroad’s current lease of the N.C. Railroad track runs through 2029, and it has an option to extend the lease through 2044. No discussions about the track rights are underway between Norfolk Southern and the state-owned company, N.C. Railroad spokeswoman Megen Hoenk said.
CATS and Norfolk Southern do have a working relationship, however, that CATS is wary of upsetting. CATS bought right-of-way from Norfolk Southern in 2003 for part of its Blue Line light rail corridor, and leased about three miles of the N.C. Railroad’s corridor for the line’s extension to UNC Charlotte.
CATS chief executive John Lewis says the Red Line remains part of ambitious transit goals for 2030, all of which face the question of how they will financed. Those include extending the Blue Line to Ballantyne and Pineville and building the proposed Silver Line light rail corridor connecting Matthews to Belmont and running near Charlotte’s airport.
No cost estimates have been cited for building the Red Line, but the suite of projects CATS plans by 2030 have been estimated to cost $6 billion to $8 billion. As a commuter rail, the Red Line would make fewer stops and be more geared to work schedules than the light rail Blue Line.
Northern Mecklenburg will rely, at least for now, on express buses using the new Interstate 77 toll lanes and direct connectors to crossing roads that will shave up to 10 minutes each way off commutes. The new service starts Monday.
“We have to remember that the (O Line) corridor is owned by Norfolk Southern and it is a very important part of their strategic assets,” Lewis said in an interview. “They’ve been a great partner to us in other corridors — the Blue Line operates on their corridor and as we plan for the Silver Line, we have to cross their corridor twice. So they’ve been very good partners, it’s just we’ve reached a point on the Red Line where our goals are in conflict at this point.”
Weed-choked railbed
The O Line wends through the small downtowns of Davidson, Cornelius and Huntersville, parallels N.C. 115 toward Charlotte, then curves east along Gibbon Road. The line parallels Sugar Creek Road, then Graham Street toward uptown Charlotte. At Norris Avenue, in view of uptown’s skyline, weeds abruptly fill the railbed.
Norfolk Southern reported only about one train a week passing most Mecklenburg County grade crossings on the O Line in the past two years, according to Federal Railroad Administration data.
CATS and Norfolk Southern would share the track, with commuter and freight trains running at different times of day, under a transit plan adopted in 2006. But Norfolk Southern changed its passenger rail policy in 2013 to prohibit such an arrangement.
In a 2018 letter, a company official told Lewis that “nothing has changed” in its position.
“Freight operations are long distance and customer-driven, which precludes ‘passenger only’ operating windows and temporal separation such as night-time-only freight operations,” says Norfolk Southern’s 2018 policy on commuter rail proposals.
A 2014 analysis by the N.C. Department of Transportation and CATS still called the O Line the most viable alternate route to the state-owned Greensboro-to-Charlotte line, one that Norfolk Southern would protect until a “permanent mainline solution” was found.
Legal action to pressure Norfolk Southern on the O Line isn’t supported by relevant laws, CATS says, and the transit authority says it doesn’t want to jeopardize their working relationship.
‘We still don’t have a train’
The Red Line stalemate, in contrast to the progress being made on transit elsewhere in Mecklenburg County, breeds frustration in the northern suburbs.
Residents and officials of the northern Mecklenburg towns, in meetings in 2018, told CATS they still strongly prefer to target the O Line as the Red Line’s corridor over other options, including laying new tracks along U.S. 21, Lewis said.
Davidson Mayor Rusty Knox, at a Nov. 20 meeting of CATS’ policy board, the Metropolitan Transit Commission, urged Lewis to include the Red Line in negotiations with Norfolk Southern for easements and track crossings by the proposed Silver Line.
“I am happy for my neighbors in Matthews and my neighbors in Gastonia that you’re (planned) to get a train, but we’ve been talking about a train for 22 years and we still don’t have a train,” Knox said, according to meeting minutes. “We look forward to the express buses that will bring us to Charlotte with some regularity, but we’ve got a defined rail corridor that, knowing that we are at the table with Norfolk Southern, I think we strike when the irons are hot. We’ve got to continue to pressure them on this corridor, and I appreciate any continued dialog you can have with them.”
References to the Red Line were “the first thing (Norfolk Southern) struck out of” documents on the Silver Line easements, Lewis responded.
Building tracks parallel to the O Line isn’t an option, he said, because Norfolk Southern’s right-of-way is poorly defined in some places and the existing track runs close beside downtown buildings.
“For us to take 50 to an extra 100 feet in many areas would probably, if not completely, destroy some of those downtowns,” Lewis said. “It would certainly drastically alter them in a way that I don’t think the citizens and leaders of those towns would want us to take.”
Still, Lewis insists there’s time to salvage commuter rail on the O Line.
“The great thing about the O Line is that the right-of-way is there,” he said. “It would require some track upgrades, but that’s a lot different from what we’re doing in other areas where there is no corridor. We have to acquire right-of-way, which takes a lot of time in negotiations and sometimes legal activity, so that impacts a project considerably. Why we chose that corridor is because it takes all of that off the table.
“If we were to get access tomorrow, we could move directly into engineering and start figuring out where we need to make upgrades and then move into construction.”