Business

Excursion train advocate envisions entertainment car

Larry Morton speaks to the Asheville Multimodal Transportation Commission about a proposed passenger excursion train between Asheville and Hendersonville.

By Bill Moss, Published: January 17, 2018

Larry Morton, the Johnny Appleseed of train travel between Hendersonville and Asheville, told Asheville transportation planners that he’s gotten nothing but enthusiastic responses for the idea of an excursion train.

“Passenger excursion trains are very popular all over the country,” Morton told the Asheville Multimodal Transportation Commission during its regular meeting on Dec. 13. “I’ve talked to five excursion train operations,” including one in New England and the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad. “All of them are doing well, all of them are very popular and they’ve all been very willing to share information and advice about how to go about it.”
Unlike a ride through the mountains or along lakes and the ocean, the Hendersonville-Asheville line would not sell itself with the view.
“If you were to take the train from one city to the other it’s not a very scenic ride,” he said. “You’re riding parallel to Highway 25, you’re looking at the back of commercial buildings, there’s nothing to entertain you. To make it attractive you’d have to have pretty low ticket prices, you’d have to get people back and forth probably a little faster than they could drive.”
Speed won’t be an attribute of this excursion train because the Class 2 track between the two cities only allows passenger trains to travel 30 miles an hour.
“So I changed my thinking and I thought why not go for a passenger where all the entertainment and all the interest is on the train? You have no reason to look out the window,” he said.
The epiphany led Morton and his steering group to look at a parlor/lounge/dining car and dream up ideas for what it night feature: pastries and coffee in the morning, wine and cheese in the afternoon, a comedian or musician for entertainment, a rolling event space for birthday parties, corporate retreats, weddings and other celebrations.
“Make it an adventure, not just a ride from point A to point B,” Morton told the Asheville board. “You could ask a lot more for the tickets. It would be a lot of fun, people would talk it up. When I started putting that idea out that’s when the enthusiasm to do this really picked up.”
He got in touch with a railroad buff in Jonesborough, Tenn., who told him “I have the perfect car for you.”
The schedule, he said, is a “floating idea that changes weekly,” possibly Wednesday through Saturday— in the morning and late afternoon.

Cost unknown

“There seems to be no negatives. The only thing I don’t know is what all this is going to cost,” he said.
He doesn’t know how much Blue Ridge Southern Railroad would charge either to operate the train or lease its tracks, even if the short-line operator was willing.
Option 1, he said, would be for “Blue Ridge Southern take this over and run everything,” he said. “They own the tracks, they have a dispatcher, they have the locomotives. It’s just a matter of picking up a suitable car. When I asked Darl Farris he said, ‘Well, you would have to prove to the home office that they can make a 30 percent profit margin.’ That would be tough to do.”
Option 2, he said, is to buy the parlor car and hire Blue Ridge Southern to haul it back and forth.
Option 3 is “our organization would buy the car and locomotive and buy track rights.” The tracks are not used during the day except for a coal train running infrequently to the Duke Energy plant on Lake Julian. The freight service to Kimberly Clark is at night, too. “So these tracks are sitting idle during the day,” he said.
Morton has made presentations to the Seventh Avenue Advisory Committee and a WNC train group and plans to repeat his Powerpoint pitch at a meeting of the Henderson County Tourism Development Authority. Morton and his committee — a group of other retirees with a broad array of experience — say boarding would most likely be in the Historic Seventh Avenue District in Hendersonville and Biltmore Village in Asheville.
Morton has spoken with Darl Farris, the general manager for Blue Ridge Southern Railroad. Morton hopes to recruit college MBA students to draft a marketing study.
Members of the Multimodal Transportation Commission were supportive if noncommittal. When one member asked whether it had potential as a commuter train, Morton said probably not because of the speed and the time it would leave in the morning.
“We’re looking for support, whether it be moral support, help you can give us or best of all money,” Morton told the panel. “Obviously we have to fund some studies to get this thing off the ground. We just got started a month or so ago and we’ve done a couple of presentations and I have to tell you every single person we’ve talked to has been very enthusiastic to see this happen.”