(The following article by Kelly Hannon was posted on the Free Lance Star website on February 26.)
FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — If you ride Virginia Railway Express, you’ve put Jay Westbrook in the hot seat.
Westbrook is an assistant vice president at CSX, the company that owns the rails from Fredericksburg to Washington.
After 21 years with the Florida-based corporation, Westbrook was recently appointed to manage passenger operations on this busy stretch of track.
In particular, he’s tasked with smoothing out what is occasionally a rocky relationship among CSX, VRE and VRE’s passengers.
Delays have plagued VRE’s Fredericksburg line over the past year, and Westbook faced some tough but polite questions from commuters yesterday at a town-hall meeting in Stafford County.
“Basically, his job is on the line unless we see some sort of improvement here,” Maureen Caddigan, a Prince William County supervisor who chairs the VRE Operations Board, told a crowd of about 40 people.
“People are angry because they’re not getting to work on time,” Caddigan said.
Westbrook is “sincere” about starting a new chapter of service, she said.
“I know he is taking this very seriously,” Caddigan said.
VRE’s chief executive officer, Dale Zehner, also attended the session at the Stafford County Administration Center. “Very few corporations” would have created a position like Westbrook’s, he said.
“CSX is committed to making this better,” Zehner said.
Westbrook explained how, through immediate and long-term changes, CSX plans to do that.
He started with a presentation that he shared with VRE’s Operations Board last month, and then took questions with Caddigan and Zehner for more than an hour. The questions were about delays, service and the potential for a third track.
CSX is doing immediate things passengers should notice, such as less track maintenance during peak travel months, Westbook said. Instead, work will shift to summer months, when more passengers take vacation.
More night work is planned. Crews will wait until 9 p.m. to begin work to avoid disrupting evening trains, he said.
And a person at CSX’s main communications desk in Florida has been charged with waking up VRE staff in the middle of the night to inform them of significant problems that could snarl service.
In the past, the CSX desk might have waited until later in the morning to inform VRE. This stranded some passengers on the earliest VRE trains who boarded before delays were known.
Long-term improvements on the Fredericksburg corridor will take years and millions of dollars, Westbook said.
When VRE began operating in 1994, CSX allowed it to run a specific number of trains a day with the agreement that VRE would build a third track in its service area. The third track is needed to prevent conflicts with Amtrak and CSX schedules.
CSX is not responsible for the cost of that third track, Westbrook said. The company turned over its excess track capacity to VRE in lieu of a cash payment.
This is a major difference from other commuter rail lines, Westbook said. Typically, the extra tracks and infrastructure needed to support commuter rail is finished before the first train pulls out of the station, he said.
With VRE, demand for public transit was so high that the trains began running with a pledge to build the extra track later, Westbrook said.
“This track is at capacity now,” he told the audience.
Stafford Supervisor Bob Gibbons, who arranged yesterday’s meeting, said the cost for building a third track from Fredericksburg to Washington is $451 million. Extending that track from Richmond to Baltimore would cost $1.8 billion, Gibbons said.
But he compared that with the cost of the Springfield Interchange Improvement Project on Interstate 95, which the most recent figures put at $676 million.
Early steps have been taken for a third track.
In December, the Commonwealth Transportation Board approved $2.5 million to complete preliminary engineering for the 11.4-mile stretch of additional track between Arkendale on the Widewater peninsula in Stafford and Powell’s Creek in Prince William.
Virginia House Speaker Bill Howell, R-Stafford, has submitted a budget amendment providing $17.6 million to fund the first year of building the track. The total cost of the Arkendale-to-Powell’s Creek track is expected to reach $70 million.
Not all rider questions yesterday were directed at CSX.
Mike Catell of Stafford, a recent VRE rider, complimented the agency on its e-mail communication system, but wondered why more announcements are not made by train staff about ongoing problems on the train and at station platforms.
“Sometimes they don’t know the situation,” Zehner answered.
VRE’s employees are hired through a contact with Amtrak. That contract requires workers to make those announcements and VRE will hold them to it, he said.
Although VRE plans another rate increase this year, its fourth in as many years, none of those present at yesterday’s meeting raised any questions about fares. Public hearings on the fare increase will be held next month.
Commuter Charles March of Stafford thanked officials for holding yesterday’s session.
“Until today, I didn’t realize the impact of that third [track],” March said.