Virginia's railroad system is seeing a record number of passengers, and that could lead to future expansion of service.
Virginia's passenger rail service logged more than 110,000 passengers in July, a record-breaking month that was a 20% increase over the previous year and a 30% increase over the previous month.
Kimberly Woods at Amtrak says the increasing ridership in Virginia might be a sign of things to come across the country.
"Ridership for our system is about 80% of our pre-pandemic levels," Woods says. "And we are coming up on the end of summer, and people are going back to school. But then there are lots of opportunities for people to travel in the fall, and of course we have the holidays coming up."
Amtrak now has two round trips to Roanoke and three round trips to Norfolk every day, plus restored service to Newport News, which had been suspended during the pandemic.
Karina Romero at the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority says railroad passengers can expect even more expansions in the future.
"That includes the I-95 corridor. We have numerous infrastructure projects that are going to be happening along that corridor that will help us increase the number of trains that we can run," Romero explains. "We're also looking at service south of Virginia from Richmond down to Raleigh. That's another project that’s not in the near future, but we're definitely working on it for the future."
The most popular route is the restored service to Newport News, which has stops at Alexandria, Woodbridge, Quantico, Fredericksburg, Ashland, Richmond and Williamsburg.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
