Fair points all around there. The biggest hiccup that I see in a cross-VA service going to Charlottesville (A CVS to CVS?
) is the TDX plans, which would route that service to Lynchburg instead of to Charlottesville. The reason this is an issue, IMHO, is that unless you're doing a
Riley-style through car operation, I don't see RVR/RVM-CVS alone being enough to support a train (heck, technically I think such a run would be shorter than the "normal" 100 mile lower limit for intercity travel). Could running it through to NPN/NFK prop things up enough? Possibly, and ditto extending it further in the west.
Likewise, doing so would involve even
more BBRR running, and IIRC that track is in lousy condition for passenger service as a whole.
Edit: Part of the reason I'm inclined to, at least at the moment, rule out two different routes there is that I suspect it will be easier (and more appealing in many ways) to get 2-3 trains/day going on a given routing and
then adding a second route. Doing one a day on each routing without seriously looking at adding other trains is likely to dilute ridership at least somewhat, and having one train take far longer than the other might also lead to a bit of confusion as well.