Selma — Mayor Charles Hester paused briefly last week to recall the day more than 50 years ago when, as a young Marine, he boarded a train bound from Quantico, Va., to Selma.

The train trek left an impression on Hester, and as state leaders mull the future of commuter rail in North Carolina, the mayor wants Selma to play a role.

“This is really a historic location in our town,” Hester said of Selma’s train station, already an Amtrak stop. “It’s one of the few stations that sits at the crossroads of both major rail lines. I hope we can market our location more in the future than we have in the past.”

A study released last month lists Selma as one of 29 possible stops on a commuter rail line that could someday stretch from Greensboro to Goldsboro.

Scott Saylor is president of the N.C. Railroad Co., which owns rail lines from Charlotte to Morehead City. Commuter rail could take pressure off of state highways, but it would be expensive, he told the Smithfield-Selma Chamber of Commerce last week.

A study by a Raleigh firm put the total cost of commuter rail at $1 billion. That’s roughly $7 million for every mile between Greensboro and Goldsboro.

Selma could be one of about 10 stops along the 49 miles between Raleigh and Goldsboro. According to the study, the state would need to spend $115.7 million to build three miles of track between Wilson’s Mills and Selma. Also, commuter rail would require new signals from Pine Level to Goldsboro, the study says.

Should it come to pass, the commuter rail line would have three segments, said Jim Kessler, of HNTB, the firm that conducted the study. Four trains would serve each segment during the morning and evening commutes, and one train would run a roundtrip at midday, he said. The segment through Selma would run from Durham to Goldsboro.

At the invitation of the chamber, a crowd of public officials and community leaders gathered last week at the Selma train station to hear about the study. Most wanted to know how long it would take to get the commuter line up and running.

Saylor, the president of the N.C. Railroad Co., said the state of the economy made a timeline hard to predict. Half of the money might come from the federal government, the rest from the state and communities along the route, he said.

“If the money was available, and we’re talking about money for Raleigh and points east, the best-case scenario would probably be five years,” Saylor said. “But if we’re talking about pushing further west toward [Research Triangle Park], it would take more than five years.”