RI readies Warwick, N.K. train stations

NORTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. (WPRI) - Commuters will be able to pay $18 for a round-trip train ride from North Kingstown to Boston and back when MBTA service is extended to South County a little more than a year from now.

Federal and state officials broke ground Wednesday morning on a new train station at Wickford Junction in North Kingstown. The eight-acre site at 1051 Ten Rod Rd. is near the intersection of Route 4 and Route 102.

• Related: The long and winding road to Wickford Junction (WPRI Blog)

Federal money will cover $43 million of the project’s $52 million cost, which includes planning, track improvements and construction of the station and a parking garage with 1,100 spaces, according to U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I.

With the addition of Wickford and the opening of the near-finished intermodal facility at T.F. Green Airport in Warwick, Rhode Island is getting its first extension of commuter rail service since Providence-Boston service restarted 22 years ago.

Adding Wickford Junction “really opens up South County to effective commuter rail service,” Reed told Eyewitness News. “It makes the station at the Warwick airport even more productive because now it becomes part of a larger system. And it provides relatively low-cost, environmentally appropriate, energy-efficient transportation – which is great.”

Eight $18 daily trips

The MBTA plans to make three round trips daily between Boston and Warwick when the airport station first opens this fall. That will increase to eight by the time Wickford opens next year, according to R.I. Department of Transportation spokeswoman Dana Alexander Nolfe.

The number of passengers using the Wickford Junction station daily is forecast to rise from about 1,500 when service starts in 2011 to 1,669 in 2020, according to projections made in 1995 and cited by state planners. An additional 240 commuters are expected to use the Warwick station.

A ticket from North Kingstown to Boston will cost $9 each way, and a monthly pass will cost $280, Nolfe said. To go from North Kingstown to Providence, a one-way ticket will cost $2.75 and a monthly pass will cost $101.

One-way trips from Warwick will cost slightly less – $2.50 to Providence and $8.25 to Boston. Officials hope the airport station will be ready to open in October. That project’s final cost is estimated at $267 million.

Environmental, traffic benefits

An estimated 82 percent of Rhode Islanders travel to work alone in their cars, while just 2 percent take mass transit, Census data showed in 2000. Getting more cars off the road will improve the environment and relieve traffic congestion, Reed said.

“That is going to be the future of the Northeast, in terms of providing rapid, high-speed service between urban centers,” he said, adding that Rhode Island and Massachusetts were right to work together on expanding a regional system with the MBTA.

A train station "becomes a focal point for economic renewal and redevelopment,” Reed said. “People want to live there, people want to walk to the station, they want to set up shop there because you can get on, and in and out.” A developer, Robert Cioe, plans to build a retail plaza next to the Wickford Junction station.

Expansion took decades

The big expansion of regional train service over the next year marks a sea change from attitudes in 1981, when MBTA trains between Providence and Boston stopped after ridership fell below 400 a day and a federal subsidy ended.

Ridership proved more robust when Providence-Boston trains started running again in 1988, with about 1,000 daily passengers between the two capitals today. In 1990, a station opened in South Attleboro, as well.

Bringing commuter trains to North Kingstown – which lost train service after more than a century when its old station was torn down in the late 1960s – has taken decades.

Discussions began in the late 1980s, and federal authorization was granted in 1998, the same year officials in Rhode Island and Massachusetts signed an agreement to add more MBTA trips and stops in the Ocean State.

Meanwhile, Reed put together about $33 million in federal earmarks for the station piece by piece over the past decade. “It’s a challenge,” he said.

Kingston, Westerly next?

The DOT is starting to examine whether additional commuter rail stops could be added further south once the Warwick and North Kingstown stations are open.

The federal government awarded the department $1.2 million earlier this year for upgrades to South Kingstown’s 135-year-old Kingston train station, which is already served by Amtrak. Those improvements could allow MBTA trains to stop there, as well.

Officials are also looking at the potential for MBTA trains to go to Westerly, which has an Amtrak stop but has not had commuter service to Providence since 1977.

Also being studied are potential MBTA stops in Cranston, East Greenwich and Pawtucket, the last of which already hosts an MBTA layover facility. Those discussions are only in the very earliest stages, Nolfe said.