(The following article by Michelle Boorstein was published by the Washington Post on September 7.)
WASHINGTON — As the Virginia Railway Express hums north from Fredericksburg to Washington, the world changes rapidly outside its windows: Dawn shakes off the darkness, woods give way to apartment complexes, rivers widen, the city comes into view.
Change is afoot inside these rail cars, too, but it is a subtler shift of a human sort — slow, sometimes invisible, but just as real as the increasingly urban landscape.
In one car sits Aaron Taylor, a 32-year-old father of three who has been eating dinner alone on the train for two years, since he started commuting the three hours each way between King William County and Washington.
Another lone commuter is David Clark, 47, a Microsoft trainer from Fredericksburg who has adopted a routine in the three months he’s taken VRE: awake at 5 a.m., on the 7:15 a.m. train and asleep again before the second stop.
In the back of the last car are the Blanchards — Sharon, a marketer at a D.C. law firm, and Jeff, a management analyst at U.S. District Court in Washington — who have turned a table into a mini-breakfast nook, with their laptop, newspapers and beverages.
“I’d never, ever drive in. My stress level at work is high enough,” said Sharon Blanchard, 50, who drove and then rode the Metro before the couple moved from Fairfax to Stafford last year.
Those are scenes from the southern edge of Washington’s mass-transit universe, where a new commuter-train culture is growing. Although this culture owes its existence to a region of epic traffic congestion and work-worship, it is a genteel landscape of conductors’ tipped caps, accompanied by “Have a lovely day, sir.” It can turn subway shovers and highway honkers into mellow folks who wait in orderly lines to board and carry special neck pillows for napping.
But the culture also turns time on its head: VRE commuters go to bed and set their alarms according to a train schedule beyond their control — and for many of them, it is a new experience. Although VRE began running a decade ago, the influx of newcomers to Stafford and Spotsylvania counties and constant turnover among the region’s government and military workers mean a steady supply of fresh riders to be absorbed into the commuter ethos.
The newcomer factor helps explain the signs posted in VRE stations, advising passengers not to jump off moving trains or brush their teeth in their seats or cut their toenails in front of other riders. For the same reason, VRE places occasional notices on the seats, saying, for example: “Leaving you is not personal. Regardless of who you are or the reason for your delay, we can’t wait.”
That is not something you’d have to explain to a rider on, say, the 170-year-old Long Island Railroad, where many passengers start their commuter-train careers as preteens. Nor would they appreciate VRE’s admonition that “Mom said it best: Feet belong on the floor!” Where VRE bans alcohol consumption altogether, the Long Island Railroad once tried to limit it to a single car — “but it didn’t work,” LIRR spokesman Brian Dolan said.
Although the Long Island Railroad draws 75 percent of Manhattan-bound commuters, only 5.5 percent of northbound commuters who live near VRE stations take commuter rail to work. But ridership has been growing, and VRE trains, on average, run at 93 percent of capacity. The most dramatic growth has been near the southernmost stops, near Manassas on one line and Fredericksburg on the other.
The trip to Union Station in the District takes 75 minutes from Manassas, 90 minutes from Fredericksburg.
Except for the crickets, Fredericksburg is dark and silent when commuters start appearing from the shadows of the historic little city. The only thing open is Nader’s Grocery, a low-key little store across the street that sells train tickets and coffee.
For reasons unknown to VRE officials, food and drink carts near train stations have mostly failed. These riders are an independent lot, bringing thermos bottles and lunchboxes.
“I think they just get accustomed to bringing their own stuff — that’s just part of the commuter train culture,” said Sharon Bulova, an early VRE advocate and chairwoman of its operations board.
On VRE, as on other commuter railways, riders tend be more educated and earn more money than the average commuter, and most have signed up to receive updates about delayed trains via e-mail or pager. But the VRE ridership is developing a distinctive character — very clean-cut, very correct — all its own. Billy Boggs, a VRE conductor who used to work for Amtrak, said VRE riders are “a different world. They are more spoiled.”
Simon Taylor, manager and chief operating officer of MARC, Maryland’s commuter train, said the relative lack of commuter rail in the United States has required a certain amount of initial hand-holding.
“In Europe and elsewhere, if you grow up riding the train as a kid, there’s more willingness as an adult, there’s a comfort level,” said Taylor, who is from London and rode the train to school as a child. “Here, people turn 16 or 17 and they immediately have a car, so there’s that fear factor and it’s hard to get over.”
Some VRE passengers get upset if they can’t always sit in the same seat each day or if another rider is talking too loudly, said Boggs, who admits to spoiling riders himself.
On a recent morning, before his 6:45 pulled out of Fredericksburg, Boggs told one rider who was having problems with her monthly pass that he would remember her that evening and let her board. At the last minute, he walked over to a station window and, for the benefit of stragglers, hollered into the parking lot that the train was departing.
As the cars get more crowded, VRE is beginning to codify cultural decisions made by passengers. Riders long ago established an unofficial “quiet car” (the one behind the engine) where cell phones are banned. Next month, VRE will make the designation official.
But even on the Long Island Railroad, commuters are changing with the times. “Most people now like to get on the train, find their seat and read or sleep,” Dolan said. “People have more complicated lives at home and more demanding lives at work. So it’s gotten tamer.”
The VRE experience will continue to evolve, as s the commute shapes riders and riders shape the commute.
Aaron Taylor, the young father, said it’s because of the train that he could take a government project manager’s job 140 miles from his home in West Point outside Richmond. (He leaves the house in the dark drives 80 miles to Fredericksburg to board the 6:45 a.m. train.)
The Blanchards seem almost giddy when they describe their commuting routine. The fact that they can relax together, work and read for an hour and 40 minutes each morning seems like a gift, considering that it takes them only slightly less time than they took to fight traffic to the Metro and ride the subway when they lived in Fairfax.
“Eight minutes,” they say in unison, grinning as they describe the car ride from home to the Leeland VRE station. They say they get home an hour later, about 7:30 p.m., than they used to, and they have to put off errands and household chores until the weekend.