“I’m 77 and I’m not going to be around to see it,” Eugene Trani, former president of Virginia Commonwealth University and planning advocate, says during an August presentation to the Scott’s Addition Boulevard Association. He wants to see a train station off Boulevard North near the present Greyhound Station.
Trani says potentially more than 300 acres, curving from the bus terminal to The Diamond and the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control warehouses on Hermitage Road, could be utilized. “This is a 20-year plan, billion-dollar plan,” Trani says.
SABA’s board previously endorsed Trani’s plan, but Trani is speaking in August at an at-capacity meeting at the Science Museum of Virginia to stoke the fires for public forums.
The tangled Acca Yards on the northern boundary of the Addition are in the process of a $132 million sorting to ease and speed the approximate eight-mile distance between the existing Staples Mill Road train station and downtown’s Main Street Station by spring 2018.
The Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation released its draft environmental impact statement on the 123-mile high-speed rail project between Washington and Richmond.
The report recommends all train traffic to stop at both the Main Street and the Staples Mill stations. Main Street is a lovely preserved building, Trani says, but its track capacity cannot be increased without risk of crowding out whatever slave memorial is created in Shockoe. Staples Mill — used by 85 percent of the region’s rail passengers — is facing parking congestion, he adds.
Richmond City Council member Kim Gray, who represents Scott’s Addition, says she favors the Scott’s Addition plan because rail experts she’s spoken with privately feel it makes the most sense. But Mayor Levar Stoney and the rest of council would need convincing.
