WASHINGTON — According to the Washington Post, Sharon S. Bulova was a member of the operations board of Virginia Railway Express during the 1980s when there was nothing to operate. No trains, no stations and no passengers, just a dream.
Bulova, a Fairfax County supervisor, was among a few believers determined to launch a commuter railroad in Northern Virginia. “I still get tears in my eyes when I see a VRE train roll up,” she recently told a crowd of rail advocates at a birthday party for the railroad.
As VRE turns 10 years old, the railroad has grown from a few trains carrying 825 passengers on one line to 32 daily trains carrying 13,000 passengers on two branches. It has helped to transform Northern Virginia as a place with a car-only culture to a community in which trains are part of the fabric.
“When I came to Virginia in 1963, there wasn’t hardly any rail here,” said George Bilmeyer, a Fairfax resident and original VRE rider whose father and grandfather worked for railroads. “There was no Metro, no commuter trains. But look how things have changed. People are much more rail-oriented than they were then.”
VRE is one of the fastest-growing commuter railroads in the country. Between April 2001 and April 2002, ridership jumped 24 percent. “That’s phenomenal,” said Dick Peacock, who has been riding the Manassas line for nine years and seen his trains grow increasingly crowded.
“VRE is the great success story of the last 10 years,” said Gov. Mark R. Warner (D), between train whistles recently outside the Alexandria rail station.
The rail service, which runs from Manassas and Fredericksburg to Washington’s Union Station, is nearing its capacity of 14,000 daily passengers. The squeeze can be traced to a ridership explosion fueled by fast-growing outer suburbs, worsening highway traffic and a January increase in the federal transit subsidy from $65 to $100 monthly. About 60 percent of VRE riders are federal employees, many of whom receive the transit subsidy.
“VRE is stretched to the gills on service,” said Alan Tobias of the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation.
Railroad officials express concern that if the trend continues, they’ll start losing customers.
“If we’re not able to accommodate the growth in ridership, people are just going to stop taking the train,” said Bulova, who still serves on the operations board. “You’ve got to have the seat. You’ve got to have the room. When people are taking long distance trains, they want to be able to sit down and relax, not to have people sitting in their laps.”
The railroad is desperate to expand its 72-car fleet. It owns five other cars, but they are parked in Wisconsin, stuck in legal limbo after the company refurbishing them declared bankruptcy. The rest of the fleet is a hodgepodge of new and secondhand rail cars, many of which have been borrowed or bought from other commuter railroads.
If VRE cannot rescue its Wisconsin cars by summer’s end, it is likely to lease a dozen from a California railroad as a stopgap.
Railroad officials are pinning their hopes on a Nov. 5 sales tax measure in which Northern Virginians will be asked to decide whether to increase the tax by a half-cent to 5 cents a dollar. That could raise as much as $5 billion over 20 years for various transportation projects, including $100 million for VRE rail cars.
The money would be used to purchase 50 bilevel cars, said Pete Sklannik Jr., VRE’s general manager. Bilevel cars carry about 50 more passengers than standard coaches and are the least expensive way to add train capacity. VRE has 17 bilevel cars and 55 standard coaches.
If the sales tax measure passes, VRE would use the money to convert the entire fleet to bilevel cars and retire the older equipment, Sklannik said.
Eventually, VRE plans to add four daily round trips as part of a new agreement negotiated with CSX Transportation Inc., which owns the track. The state has agreed to spend $66 million to improve tracks and rail bridges so both the freight and commuter railroads can run more trains. But those changes will take years.
Before VRE can add many trains, it needs a storage yard near Union Station. The railroad is negotiating to buy 2.3 acres in an Ivy City railway yard owned by CSX.
VRE officials are also talking with their counterparts at MARC, the Maryland commuter railroad, about running trains through the District onto each other’s tracks. That would allow Maryland passengers to travel directly to VRE’s L’Enfant, Crystal City and Alexandria stations and allow Virginia riders to travel to MARC’s New Carrollton, Baltimore-Washington International Airport, Silver Spring and Rockville stations.
Commute times would decrease for both groups of riders and eliminate the need to transfer to the Metro system.
Sklannik said VRE is likely to grow in the next decade and beyond.
“Provided we have the capital investment and cooperation from our host railroad, we see a future of more peak trains, weekend service and serving those undiscovered markets,” he said. “There’s no question we should be running from Richmond, Gainesville, Haymarket and Charlottesville. The future may even be statewide. Virginia is running out of highway.”