I spoke with my Delegate about this. As I understand, part of the project is to eventually make some upgrades on the line to Norfolk so the trains can run at about 110 MPH (the mentioned signaling upgrades). That said, I'm ambivalent about it because it's likely to jeopardize the Newport News link...the concern that Glen Oder raised is that you'll still get the 50,000 people stopping at Williamsburg, VA, but you'll lose a lot of the 110,000 people you get at NPN. You could easily get a replacement stop at Suffolk (about 20-30 minutes south, across the river). The WBG stop is a big one, but I'm not sure that both would survive if we get another batch of cuts to Amtrak.
Now that's an alarming scenario. If Norfolk kills Newport News, that means no more service to Main Street. Amtrak wouldn't back the Regional trains down to Main Street from Staples Mill just for a fraction of Richmond passengers who prefer Main Street. And how many Main Street passengers are really going to Norfolk via Newport News thruway bus connection?
They wouldn't. You'd reverse the existing Norfolk-NPN bus connection in the event of a cut. The big issue here is WBG, which gets caught in the lurch...especially if VA gets slapped with a big bill here. Look, we're willing to pay for train service...but there's always going to be a limit, and too much of a hike could force cutbacks. And cutting WBG is a bit of an issue because that's 50,000 trips you'd lose outright. My
gut says that it'll stay as long as VA doesn't have to subsidize both lines, but I doubt the state will pay for both.
The worst part is that apparently, the Lynchburg-DC line is self-sustaining in terms of revenue versus cost (and turning a nominal profit) but the state apparently has to kick in money to keep it going (which makes
no sense whatsoever tp me). If I had to guess, based on travel figures, the RVR-WAS line probably is as well...though there you have complications relating to the Silver Service in terms of passengers served. The whole route (NPN-WAS) is running about 470,000 people per year (or close to 1300 per day)...granted, that includes both ways (north and south), but even still...650/day is nothing to sneeze at. What I
don't know is if that's spread over the nine trains per day that go through RVR (we've got four "through" trains on the RVR-WAS part of the corridor: 2 Silvers, the Carolinian, and the Palmetto), or just the 5 Northeast Regional trains per day. If it's the former, then it's nothing particularly special (71 per train); if it's the latter, then that's a
lot of people (128/train versus the profit-making Lynchburg run at 172/day on one daily run)and the run should at least in theory be self-sustaining.
Of course, I don't know how an NPN-NYP or RVR-PHL ticket gets logged (i.e. as NEC Spine, WAS-NPN, or both).