(The following article by Chip Jones was posted on the Richmond Times-Dispatch website on August 17.)
RICHMOND, Va. — Amtrak and commuter rail service in Northern Virginia, plagued by slowdowns since the weekend, started improving yesterday after an emergency meeting between rail officials.
“You need to keep freight trains out of the way so we can operate on time, and get people to work on time,” said Mark Roeber, spokesman for the Virginia Railway Express. “They’ve kept everything out of the way.”
He was referring to the owner of the track, CSX Corp.
Top officials at CSX’s Jacksonville, Fla., headquarters conferred with the head of the commuter rail Monday night, Roeber said.
Ridership down 50 percent
Some commuter trains from Fredericksburg to Washington had to be canceled or consolidated Monday and yesterday. The VRE’s ridership dropped by about 50 percent — about 1,600 people — during the morning commute.
This followed reports of trains crawling along at 20 mph on a 24-mile stretch of railroad. The slowdown was required as signals were down during work on a state-funded rail-improvement project.
The publicly owned commuter rail pays CSX to use its tracks.
CSX officials ordered a halt to some of their freight trains during yesterday morning’s commute, Roeber said, and promised to keep a close eye on the sector last night.
Completion expected today
The track and signal work is expected to be done by today, said CSX spokesman Robert Sullivan.
“We apologize for the problems associated with our service in the past several days, and in particular for delays for VRE customers last night,” Sullivan said. “We’ll look very closely at what happened here in the past several days,” he said, and try not to have a repeat during future track improvement work.
Amtrak advised passengers to check its Web site — www.amtrak.com — in case any more delays happen.