(The following article by Chip Jones was posted on the Richmond Times-Dispatch website on June 23.)
RICHMOND, Va. — The heat is on CSX Corp. — again.
This week, the head of the Virginia Railway Express pleaded for relief from operating mix-ups and heat-related procedures that have created logjams for passengers and hampered the commuter railroad’s on-time performance.
Dale Zehner, chief executive officer of the Northern Virginia commuter line, wrote a CSX executive Monday to express “frustration and disappointment” with the treatment his trains are getting on the 55-mile Fredericksburg-to-Washington line.
The VRE, a publicly owned transportation partnership, pays CSX about $3.6 million to run on CSX lines. It provides nearly 16,000 passenger trips a day.
This week’s flap is reminiscent of last summer, when the VRE made similar complaints after its Florida-based host railroad imposed heat-related restrictions that slowed passenger trains down by 20 mph when temperatures were forecast to be at least 90 degrees.
The restrictions are a pre- caution to avoid dangerous “kinks” that occur as steel rails expand and contract as temperatures rise and fall. This can cause trains to derail.
This month, CSX lowered its heat threshold to 85 degrees, according to VRE spokesman Mark Roeber. “Almost every single day there were slow orders” on the Fredericksburg line, he said.
The issue reached the boiling point Monday after a solar-powered charger on an electric lock on a CSX track-switching device failed and prevented passenger trains from getting around a slower-moving freight train. As a result, two VRE passenger trains got stuck behind a CSX train going 6 mph for 18 miles between Fredericksburg and Quantico.
As a result, a 90-minute trip stretched to three hours.
Zehner wrote John Gibson, vice president passenger and operations planning at CSX, that the commuter railroad has made a large investment in CSX’s infrastructure — approaching $100 million “in actual and planned investments.”
Yet, Zehner wrote, “We are also seeing a significant degradation in OTP,” or on-time performance. For the Fredericksburg line, he said, the trains barely reached 40 percent on-time performance in June. “This level of service is unacceptable to both our passengers and me.”
Besides his strongly worded message to CSX, the VRE chief released a letter to his customers saying, “When you’re not happy, we’re not happy. Right now, we are downright frustrated.”
Zehner did offer CSX a possible solution to change the long-standing issues between the Northern Virginia rail and CSX: Assign a full-time CSX supervisor — paid for by the Virginia Railway Express — to be assigned to the Fredericksburg-Washington area.
“The delays,” Zehner said, “could have been resolved more quickly with adequate field supervision.”
A CSX spokeswoman said the company is studying Zehner’s proposal, and regrets the operating problems.
“We certainly regret the service delays that have inconvenienced VRE passengers,” CSX’s Misty Skipper said. “We’re unhappy with the performance of those passenger trains.”
She added, “Some of the delays are the result of a high volume of traffic moving through the area,” where about two-thirds of trains carry commuter or Amtrak passengers.
“That’s why we’ve been working with the Virginia Railway Express and the commonwealth of Virginia to address these issues,” Skipper said.
She listed several rail-improvement projects, including a rail “interlocking” that allows trains to switch from one track to another in any direction. The latest interlocking project near Aquia Harbour in Stafford County, set to be finished by this fall, will provide more options to put trains on open railroad.
A new bridge will add a second set of tracks where today a single set crosses Quantico Creek. The $26 million project may be done by early 2007.
According to Skipper, these and other upgrades should help alleviate the congestion and “really give our dispatchers greater flexibility.”
Amtrak, which operates 20 trains a day in Virginia, also has felt some of “the ripple effect” from the CSX issues, spokesman Cliff Black said. Amtrak passenger trains also run on CSX lines in the state.
Amtrak has had to adjust its schedule this summer because of a large track-replacement project under way from Richmond to North Carolina.
“We realize the railroads have to make capital improvements in their right of ways, but this has had a very negative effect on our operations,” Black said.