After severe weather and repeated flight delays left them stranded in New York for four days last year, Susan Kluttz and her husband finally bit the bullet. They abandoned their plane tickets and booked seats on Amtrak’s Carolinian train, which Kluttz said took them from Penn Station in New York City to the train depot in Salisbury, N.C., six blocks from their house.
Kluttz, a longtime rail advocate and former Salisbury mayor who’s currently mayor pro tem, said she’s grateful she was able to take the train — and she wants Asheville to have the same access to rail travel that her city has.
“It connects you with the world,” Kluttz told BPR in an interview. “And Asheville is just too cut off right now. And we need to get that back. Asheville and Western North Carolina need to have the advantages that we’ve experienced in Salisbury, of being right on that line.”
Kluttz spoke earlier this month at a rail conference in Morganton, where about 140 people strategized about the way forward for a potential Asheville-to-Salisbury passenger rail line. The event was organized by a nonprofit called the Western North Carolina Rail Committee…