CARY - The remodeled train station in downtown Cary has doubled in size and is now staffed with Amtrak ticket agents who can tell you whether the Silver Star is running on time.

It puts Raleigh's cramped depot to shame. Actually, the Cary station has been doing that for years, even when there was nobody to check your bags.

"I'd much rather come here than I would Raleigh," said Frank McDowell, of Clayton. "It's easy to get to, and you can get right back on the interstate."

McDowell is a frequent train rider.

He and his wife moved to Clayton a few years before he retired from his IT job with the Charlotte Police Department, and he became an Amtrak commuter. He would catch the Piedmont from Cary to his job in Charlotte on Monday morning, sleep four nights in a townhouse they still owned and ride home Friday afternoon.

He was back in Cary Sept.1 when the station reopened after its expansion to 6,200 square feet. He walked inside to meet the new Amtrak agent and admire the big waiting room with its long wooden pews.

Then McDowell waited on Platform A to meet a friend arriving on the Piedmont from Charlotte. As Carolyn Dellinger stepped down from the train, he took her bag with one hand and gestured with the other toward the handsome red-brick entrance.

"It's beautiful," McDowell told her as they walked to the parking lot, which was enlarged as part of the station expansion.

You can catch the trains here that also make their round-trip stops in Raleigh each day: the Charlotte-to-New York Carolinian, the Miami-to-New York Silver Star, and two Charlotte-to-Raleigh Piedmonts.

Cary's Amtrak station on North Academy Street also serves as the downtown transfer point for two Triangle Transit regional buses and four local C-Tran routes.

Bus riders have their own new waiting room.

A you-are-here map shows rail travelers that the station is in the heart of Cary's downtown.

The library, town hall, arts center, post office and community center are all within a couple of blocks, and there are places nearby to shop or get lunch.

"It's a hustling, bustling area over there, with the transfers going on between Triangle Transit and C-Tran," said Ray Boylston, Cary's transit administrator. "It provides them an attractive place to wait between buses."

Now that Cary's station is open and Durham has moved its depot into 10,000 square feet of an old tobacco warehouse, Raleigh has the third-largest Amtrak station in the Triangle.

But Raleigh's 5,000-square-foot depot on Cabarrus Street is still the busiest Amtrak stop between Richmond, Va., and the Auto Train station at Sanford, Fla.

Amtrak expects to serve 191,000 passengers getting on or off the train in Raleigh this year - a five-year increase of 61 percent.

Cary's projected count for 2011 is 42,000 passengers, and that's 105 percent more than it handled five years ago.

In Raleigh, city and state planners have struggled to come up with a plan for a new Amtrak station that can also bring together a transfer point for planned commuter trains and local and regional transit service.

Amtrak officials think the improved Cary station will draw more passengers away from the station in Raleigh. McDowell thinks so, too.

"I don't know what they're going to do with that one in Raleigh," McDowell said. "I was only there a couple of times. It was just old. I didn't think it was in such a great part of town. In Cary, you feel safe going there. Cary's just great."