Virginia Association of Railway Patrons

Modern Transportation for the Virginias

Newport News Plans New Stations

From VARP’s On Track newsletter, winter 2011

Newport News’s current Amtrak station is suffering from success. The facility, built in 1982 off Warwick Boulevard in the Rivermont neighborhood, frequently operates above capacity. “The station is about to be overrun with people,” said city planner Carl Jackson, quoted in the January 15 Newport News Daily Press. “Now, you sometimes have 200 people waiting there. There’s no place to sit down, the bathrooms are small, and there's not enough parking.”

The city’s plan is to build a large multimodal station—including bus stations and shuttles—on 31 city-owned acres off of Bland Boulevard, near the Newport News–Williamsburg International Airport, plus a small self-service train station in downtown, off 30th Street.

“We want to be ready for when high-speed comes here,” Michael King, the Newport News community planning manager, told the Daily Press. “We’re confident that rail is going to be a big part of the future.”

Even without true high-speed rail, conventional intercity passenger train service down the Peninsula is expected to more than double by 2025, according to a study by the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation. Adding a third daily round trip train would more than triple ridership even if the trains stay at the current maximum of 79 mph. If the trains ramp up to 110 mph or more, ridership could reach 1 million or more per year, according to the study.

Newport News officials hope to pay for the rail stations in part with an unused $29 million 1998 Congressional earmark that would have gone for a ramp onto Interstate 64 at Bland Boulevard. City planner Jackson said that Newport News applied for a federal transportation grant in 2010 for the train station, but that the city did not receive the $17 million it was seeking. Jackson said he believes it’s because the planning for the station wasn’t far enough along. Using a $2 million federal congestion relief grant, the city expects to begin contracting the design, environmental, and engineering work on the new $24 million multimodal station this summer. Once the design work is under way later this year, the city will have a better chance of obtaining federal funds for construction, Jackson said.