A record of nearly 740,000 passengers rode the Charlotte-to-Raleigh corridor in 2025, according to figures presented to North Carolina lawmakers on April 2 by Jason Orthner, head of the North Carolina Department of Transportation's rail division.

"This is an incredible increase in ridership and representative not just of our state, but the way these services are growing across the country as well," Orthner told the General Assembly's Joint Transportation Oversight Committee.

The state-operated NC By Train service runs under Amtrak operation. Its growth is now feeding into an expansion pipeline shared with the Federal Railroad Administration, which has selected seven of 12 corridors North Carolina submitted to its Corridor Identification and Development program.

The corridors chosen for further review are Salisbury-to-Asheville, Raleigh-to-Wilmington, Raleigh-to-Fayetteville, Charlotte-to-Kings Mountain, Raleigh-to-Winston-Salem, Charlotte-to-Atlanta, and Charlotte-to-Washington DC. Wilmington and Asheville are the two most prominent cities in the state currently without passenger rail; planners have also examined potential routes to Morehead City and Greenville. NCDOT will resubmit the five corridors the FRA did not select.

"Those are all in a pipeline right now of development with FRA, where FRA is leading the process to ensure those projects are fully evaluated for their cost, schedule and budget," Orthner said. The agency will determine whether the corridors merit federal funding covering 80% of construction costs, leaving the state responsible for the remaining 20%.

The selection is a procedural step, not a funding commitment. Each corridor must still clear FRA evaluation of cost, schedule and budget before any construction money flows.

Orthner identified two constraints on improving the existing network. First, NC By Train passengers want more stops and higher frequencies, but federal railroad labor rules and shared use of track with freight carriers limit what NCDOT can schedule. Second, the fleet includes locomotives and rail cars dating to the 1950s and 60s.

"We want to make sure that we get as many turns out of the equipment as we can, similar to the airlines," he said. "And then there's time to prepare trains for return trip. They just can't turn on a dime. We've got to clean them. We've got to inspect them, got to make sure that they're ready for the return trip."

Fleet replacement will come from a plant inside the state. Siemens Mobility opened a factory in Lexington this month to build Amtrak's next-generation Airo trainsets. The trains produce less diesel exhaust and carry passenger amenities including improved lighting, power sockets and wider windows. Orthner said the seating layout will expand capacity: "They'll double our [passenger] capacity because the seating is much more extensive."

The Airo trainsets are scheduled to enter service on the New York-to-Charlotte Carolian in 2028, giving the state a measured delivery date against which fleet plans can be tracked while the FRA evaluates the seven candidate corridors for federal construction funding.