Asheville – On April 8, a loud noise was heard in South Asheville. It was familiar yet difficult to identify. It wasn’t an ambulance siren or a car horn; it was a train!
In fact, it was the first train to travel through Asheville since November 27, when Norfolk Southern’s AS Line, which runs from Morristown, Tennessee, to Salisbury, was shut down. Helene had clobbered the tracks with trees, covered them in debris, and floated chunks downstream. The swollen rivers and landslides washed away the earth beneath the remaining tracks. Over 21,000 feet of track broke off, and 50,000 feet were subject to scour, washout, or landslides. Bridges were destroyed, and former Representative Ray Rapp reported that in one location, a long strip of track was left dangling. In Newport, Tennessee, a bridge crossing the Pigeon River collapsed three weeks after the storm.
Three days after the storm, railroad crews managed to remove over 15,000 trees and fill multiple washouts. By October 9, stretches west of Newport and east of Old Fort were ready to open. It took longer to clear paths to the rest of the line and haul in materials for reconstruction that typically arrive by train. In some areas, the railroad had to wait for utility restoration.
The railroad met its amended deadline for repairing the Newport-to-Grovestone section. This section follows the French Broad River to Asheville and then follows I-40, including switching stations in Biltmore Village and the River Arts District. Portions of this section were obliterated.
While the rail line was out of service, businesses that rely on freight trains for large commodity shipments—such as breweries, asphalt plants, and quarries—either remained closed or had to arrange more expensive logistical solutions. To make matters worse, many of these businesses lost their inventories due to the storm. Norfolk Southern has not yet commented on when they expect to open the remaining 13 miles of track that traverse the Old Fort descent.
Railroad aficionados, not wanting to let a good crisis go to waste, are optimistic that the need to rebuild the railroad will facilitate the construction of accommodations for passenger rail. For decades, enthusiasts have been urging local governments to support this initiative. In Asheville, city council members argued that passenger rail was a luxury that couldn’t sustain itself without government subsidies, asserting that public transportation dollars are meant for the poor.
Elsewhere, Rapp and Marion Mayor Steve Little support the idea of an Amtrak train servicing Asheville. They even co-chair the Western North Carolina Rail Committee. Little, a railroad historian, explained that the part of the railroad that remains unrepaired was an engineering feat. It was built between 1875 and 1879 by convicts, 97% of whom were Black and “’convicted’ under Jim Crow laws and given long sentences to supply free labor.” Their job was to lay track with a safe grade and gentle enough radii of curvature to allow freight trains to navigate the 1,022-foot drop and 3.4-mile map-view distance from the top of the Eastern Continental Divide to the Piedmont.
The finished product was a winding 8.4 miles long with seven tunnels, including the 1,800-foot Swannanoa Tunnel. A memorial fountain was constructed along the tracks to honor the 120 workers who died on the job. “This exact same route was used constantly for roughly 150 years until Hurricane Helene…,” noted Little.
A feasibility study prepared for the NCDOT in 2023 concluded that equipping the rail route for passenger travel between Asheville and Salisbury would cost $665 million, and rumors circulated that the federal government was going to earmark $500,000 for the project. Little added that “about a year ago, Amtrak accepted the Asheville-to-Salisbury corridor for the return of passenger service.”
That was before Helene and before DOGE. Joey Hopkins of the North Carolina Department of Transportation is on record saying, “All of our grants are kind of on pause with the new administration.”