(The following editorial by Steve Dunham was posted on the Free Lance-Star website on February 19. Steve Dunham of Spotsylvania County commutes on Virginia Railway Express to Arlington. He chairs the board of directors of the Virginia Association of Railway Patrons.)
FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — CSX can handle both freight and passenger trains and do it well, said Jay Westbrook, the company’s assistant vice president for public-private partnerships.
But to do that, CSX–the railroad over which Virginia Railway Express Fredericksburg trains run–needs a third track between Washington and Richmond, Westbrook said.
At a meeting of its operations board last month, VRE agreed to pay for engineering work for a third track between Powell’s Creek in Prince William County and Arkendale Road in Stafford County–a distance of about 11 miles.
A third track already exists between Crystal City in Arlington and a junction in Alexandria–about five miles. Construction of another seven miles from the Alexandria junction south toward Springfield was funded by Virginia in 2000, but construction has not yet begun.
In the 1990s, the commonwealth recognized that a third track to increase railroad capacity was needed if Richmond-Washington rail passenger service were ever to be frequent, fast and reliable. In 2000, the state funded several projects to increase capacity: the third track from the Alexandria junction to Springfield, rebuilding the Alexandria junction, a crossover at Arkendale, about a mile of third track on either side of the Potomac River bridge, and a new bridge over Quantico Creek.
The present Quantico Creek bridge is the only single-track stretch on the line, and the new double-track bridge will allow a three-track crossing of the creek.
Triple track from Powell’s Creek in Prince William to Arkendale in Stafford is ideal for the next step, said Westbrook, because that segment has only one major water crossing: Quantico Creek, where the new bridge is already under construction and is expected to open in 2007. Getting started on the third track soon would be more efficient than the current plan, which calls for a double-track crossing of the creek, leaving part of the new bridge unused and later reconfiguring it to three tracks.
Combined with the other projects, it would make about 24 miles into triple track, out of 54 miles between Washington’s Union Station and Fredericksburg.
Laying a third track over the rest of the line would be more difficult because of water crossings–the Rappahannock River, Potomac Creek, Aquia Creek, Powell’s Creek, Neabsco Creek, the Occoquan River and the Potomac River.
But Westbrook said that triple track between the bridges would still yield a big capacity improvement. The short double-track stretches across the bridges would not create the kind of bottleneck presented by the current single-track crossing of Quantico Creek.
It has been the railroad’s position for decades that commuter trains need their own tracks.
The Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad “says it will listen to proposals for commuter service,” newsman Don Philips wrote in a 1977 article in Trains magazine, but a railroad official said that commuter trains “ought to be on their own facilities.” Back in 1977, there were only 32 daily trains on the line, counting 14 Amtrak trains, and Philips could write, “Almost never does one RF&P train interfere with another.”
VRE commuters know how much that has changed. VRE alone operates 13 passenger trains and one deadhead (empty) trip on weekdays, Amtrak runs 18 trains on a typical day, and CSX runs dozens of freights. The trains seem to continually be in one another’s way, partly because they operate at various speeds.
The current operating pattern, with so many more Amtrak and VRE trains, has pushed more freight trains into nighttime slots, with no room for things to go wrong, Westbrook said. And sometimes things do go wrong.
To accommodate the currently scheduled passenger trains and more in the future, the state is willing to buy more track–with strings attached, guaranteeing more slots for passenger trains.
For years, CSX was afraid to touch public money, Westbrook said, which is why the Arkendale, Quantico and the Alexandria-to-Springfield projects languished for years, the state’s appropriation unspent. Now, CSX has a construction contract with the state, he said, and is ready to keep moving ahead.
While Westbrook works to get funding for a third track all the way to Richmond, he is confident that, with the current projects, passengers will see significant improvements within a few years.