Despite the surprising (or, for many, not so surprising) downturn in ridership at Virginia Railway Express, the system is buying more railcars.
The 50 bi-level cars will cost just more than $92 million and will represent a 25 percent increase in seating capacity. The first cars should begin to arrive in December of next year.
The real reason for the downturn at VRE has more to do with schedule reliability than with capacity. Al writes: “Major causes of VRE’s problems have been the CSX priorities. CSX will always give their freight priority over people. Even Amtrak, a National Railroad Passenger Corporation, is delayed due to freight, etc. [Several] weeks ago, we had an hour and a half delay due to a slow-moving New York trash train that had to stop ever so often to check its brakes and wait for another trash train in front of it. That says: Trash is more important to CSX than people.
[The other] night was another of a series of CSX versus VRE (and the heck with the people) incident. An ‘outlaw’ train [one whose] crew was at its maximum authorized work time) was stopped between stations on the inside track, and not on a nearby side-track designed for such occasions. The VRE train behind this outlaw train had to back up to a previous station, switch tracks and go around that stopped train. This maneuver, along with CSX heat restrictions, caused [the VRE] train to be more than two hours late getting back to Fredericksburg. CSX knew this crew was near its time, but did nothing to prevent this from happening, nor did they tell VRE far enough in advance so they could manage their trains.”
Unfortunately, the chance of VRE owning its own tracks instead of relying on CSX is remote at best. Until that’s resolved, all the high-capacity cars in the world won’t help.
Watching the trains
I found something that everybody who uses Maryland’s MARC service should know about. This would also be something of value for those waiting for someone coming home on MARC. It’s called the MARCTracker, online at www.marctracker.com, and it is a live look at the location of every train operating in the system.
The trains are shown as boxes overlain on the tracks. Using GPS location systems on each train, the system keeps track of the location of each one that is in service. Each “box” has a number that corresponds to the train and the box changes color depending on any delays. The map is one of the clearest, easiest to read I’ve ever seen online. The site automatically updates so there is no need to click on the refresh button to keep it up to date. It shows the stations that connect with Amtrak, Ride On and Metro and even includes the track locations for VRE.
Questions, comments, random musings? Write to Steve@ SprawlandCrawl.com.
