The Case for Improved Passenger Rail in Upstate South Carolina

Among urban regions along the eastern seaboard, the upstate South Carolina region – primarily defined by the Greenville-Spartanburg metropolitan corridor – doesn't receive much attention. Its downstate counterparts of Charlestown and Columbia benefit from larger profiles, both nationally and regionally. And even those cities are dwarfed by the larger metropolises in the southeast, Atlanta and Charlotte. But with their combined metropolitan populations of more than 1.1 million residents, Greenville and Spartanburg combine to form an activity zone larger then either Charlestown or Columbia on their own.

Moreover, the roughly 30-mile Greenville-Spartanburg corridor features the sort of solid and growing density that suggests the need for greater intra-corridor mobility. A handful of smaller cities, communities, villages and towns along the route – such as Saxon, Arcadia, Wellford, Lyman, Duncan, Greer, Taylors and Wade Hamptons – are connected by two parallel rail lines that could host frequent and reliable passenger rail service. And while the entire Charlotte–Atlanta corridor – of which Greenville-Spartanburg lies at the heart – is primed for improved intercity rail service, let's spend some time here just looking at this key upstate corridor for now and save the larger span for another day.

Map created via Google Maps; click here to view in Google Maps

Currently, the only scheduled passenger rail service between Spartanburg and Greenville is Amtrak's daily Crescent trains between New York and New Orleans which travels over Norfolk Southern's Piedmont Division line (depicted by the blue line in the map above). While the Crescent might work for some long-distance travelers, it makes the 41-minute trip between the two cities in the very early morning on the southbound trip and very late at night on its northbound counterpart (view the PDF schedule here), hardly convenient for riders looking to travel within the corridor. Greyhound also operates several daily trips in both directions at more convenient times than the Crescent. Still, for a region of more than 1.1 million people, only a handful of options to link its two largest communities is insufficient, let alone the absence of service two destinations like Greer and Duncan within the corridor.Norfolk Southern's 31-mile line – which the railroad classifies under its Charlotte and Greenville districts on the Piedmont Division – would be the more natural facility over which a regional rail service to operate through the corridor. Given that the line already hosts the Crescent, and that the railroad is seen as slightly more amenable to new passenger rail operations than its competitor, CSX, the path to initiating such a service would be less challenging than CSX's parallel Spartanburg Subdivision route. Nonetheless, both routes navigate through the heart of the metropolitan area and are fine examples of well-maintained rail infrastructure which can and do host regular train speeds at 79 mph.

To be clear, there currently aren't any active plans for rail service in the corridor. The South Carolina State Rail Plan – last updated in 2008 – references a 1999 study by Wilbur Smith Associates for the Greenville County Planning Commission and the Spartanburg County Planning Department entitled Greenville/Spartanburg Area Commuter Rail Feasibility, which is not available online. Elsewhere, an internet group discussed the topic that same year, while the former 11.3-mile Greenville & Northern Railway between Greenville and Traveller's Rest was acquired by public entities in 2006 and is currently in use as a rail-trail and could ultimately be converted for rail transit service in the future. In the meantime, state and local trends in South Carolina suggest there is unlikely to be a groundswell of political will to support improved passenger rail options in the state anytime soon. And even if there were, an agreement with either Norfolk Southern or CSX to operate service over their respective lines would not be easy to come by. However, attitudes of political officials, community leaders and the public at large towards passenger rail have changed rapidly elsewhere in the recent past, in places like Arizona, New Mexico, North Carolina and Virginia. With the Greenville-Spartanburg corridor's strong population density and economic growth patterns, it's hardly inconceivable to think that a similar attitudinal transportation could happen here, as well...