(The Washington Post placed the following article by Jay Mathews on its website on December 23.)
WASHINGTON — Regular weekday service for more than 8,000 commuters using the Virginia Railway Express will resume Monday, rail officials said yesterday.
Passengers on the Fredericksburg and Manassas commuter lines have been stuffing themselves into the few trains that could get past the scene of Thursday’s derailment of 19 CSX freight cars in Alexandria, but the repair and replacement of tracks and switches will allow resumption of full daily 32-train service next week, VRE spokesman Mark Roeber said.
“We hope that most of the work will be done by then and there will only be minor repairs and checks left to do,” Roeber said.
Because of repairs at the Iron Mixing Bowl, the major rail intersection where the accident occurred, the VRE commuter lines are currently operating under the “S” schedule: just three trains leaving Fredericksburg and four leaving Manassas in the morning. There are four trains returning to Fredericksburg and four to Manassas from Union Station in the afternoon.
That schedule will continue the rest of this week. There will be no service Thursday or Jan. 1; on Jan. 2, trains will run on the S schedule.
Roeber said that VRE officials have not yet calculated the derailment’s cost to the commuter service. VRE pays CSX a fee based on how many trains use the freight company’s tracks, so the reduced number of commuter runs means that VRE is spending less money, Roeber said.
The accident, which rail officials suspect was caused by a broken wheel on one rail car, twisted about 1,100 feet of track near a spot where three lines run parallel to each other. CSX crews finished replacing all the damaged rails over the weekend but still must replace four high-tech switches, a CSX spokesman said. There are a number of switches at the Iron Mixing Bowl, which allow trains to go from track to track and pass each other.
Roeber said the newer, faster switches were part of a $13 million overhaul of the Alexandria rail intersection that allowed commuter trains to pass through at 40 to 45 mph, rather than the 15 mph limit with older switches.
Crowding was particularly bad on the No. 302 train that left Fredericksburg at 5:45 a.m. yesterday, according to a VRE e-mail bulletin for commuters. Rail officials said they planned to double the size of that train this morning. The rail company warned passengers that the No. 305 train leaving Union Station at 4:04 p.m. would continue to be crowded because of its popularity and suggested switching to the No. 301, leaving at 1 p.m., or the No. 309, leaving at 5:15 p.m.
The 96-car freight train that derailed was traveling from Richmond to Baltimore on Thursday when at 5:43 a.m. several cars swerved and jackknifed just south of the King Street Amtrak station, near Business Center Drive and Quaker Lane. Six of the cars were empty hazardous-material containers, and rail officials reported no significant leaks of dangerous materials and no injuries in the accident.
The derailment shut down Metro’s Blue Line for an hour. Roeber said investigators had still not determined the cause of the accident, despite suspicions about the broken wheel. “We hope to know more by the end of this week, or next week, but we don’t have any conclusive findings yet,” he said.