(The following editorial by Chip Jones was posted on the Richmond Times-Dispatch website on August 22.)
RICHMOND, Va. — What do CSX Corp. and Paul Newman have in common?
As the prison boss (played by Strother Martin) told Newman in “Cool Hand Luke,” the film classic about life in a rural prison camp, “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
A communications failure was the underlying theme last week during a saga that played out along CSX’s rail line between Richmond and Washington.
The drama was most intense for commuters who rely on the Virginia Railway Express from Fredericksburg and points north to get to work and back every day.
It all started on Aug. 13 as CSX work crews got out on the railroad to make important upgrades on a 24-mile stretch between Fredericksburg and Quantico. This meant the train signals were out of commission — creating what rail officials call a “dark” region.
As a result, workers had to move switches on the track by hand, and CSX supervisors on the ground communicated with train engineers.
(Typically CSX does its dispatching from its operations center in Jacksonville, Fla.)
Some trains had to slow to 20 mph — and passengers got hot as Cool Hand Luke out on the chain gang. Public money is being used for this work, incidentally. The upgrades are part of a $65 million state-funded rail improvement program.
The Arkendale crossover should let freight and passenger trains get out of each other’s way — thus avoiding backups that bedevil VRE riders and people riding Amtrak.
More work is to be done over the next year or more, and more improvements made — eventually.
But if this project is any indication, everyone who rides the VRE or Amtrak should stay alert, and make sure the line is in good repair. One way to do this is by checking the VRE’s informative Web site — www.vre.org, where service updates are posted.
Amtrak also has a Web site www.amtrak.com — but if last week is any indication, some of its warnings come too late.
The VRE was still warning its riders late in the week that “we have not been notified by CSX that work on the Arkendale crossover is successfully complete.”
One more “failure to communicate?”
By late Thursday, a message of hope came from CSX, the nation’s third-largest railroad.
“It is back in service,” spokesman Robert Sullivan said of the new crossover. “It worked as planned this morning and everything worked on time.”
To give CSX its due, Sullivan already had issued an apology to rail passengers about the problems in Virginia. Still, VRE lost considerable ridership last week, with an estimated 50 percent drop.
It was no picnic for Amtrak, either, which had at least 15 trains delayed. Five-hour rides to Washington — only 100 miles to the north — became the norm.
CSX officials say they hope to avoid a repeat of the “Cool Hand Luke” scenario.
Next time track work is done, Sullivan said, “We want to make sure everyone has a good understanding” of what’s ahead.
There’s no time like the present: CSX plans to replace 81,000 rail ties on 80 miles of track between Aug. 28 and November. Along with a parallel project by Norfolk Southern — which the VRE uses for its Manassas line “work on both lines will make for some slow going in August,” the VRE Web site said.
By now, it seems, rail passengers should be used to it.
But maybe next time around there will be no “failure to communicate”