The conductors and engineers who work on Virginia Railway Express trains are put up in hotel rooms every day, given free reign to use the pool, exercise room or watch television as part of their jobs. The company that operates the commuter train service rents 40 rooms in the middle of each weekday at the Fairfield Inn and Holiday Inn Express hotels off New York Avenue Northeast between the morning and afternoon trips that connect commuters from Northern Virginia to jobs in Washington.
VRE workers’ schedules vary, but the first trains of the day leave at 5:05 a.m. and the last ones return just after 8 p.m., not including the preparation time required for the crews. The workers have a break window of anywhere from four to seven hours.
It’s too far for them to return home in the downtime. They don’t have a ride as the trains that brought them into the District are parked in a rail yard during the break. And federal regulations limit them to no more than 12 hours continuous work without rest time, said Gregg Baxter, general manager for Keolis, which has the VRE contract.
Some commuter train services don’t need to find a place for workers to rest because they have enough service going back and forth to shuttle the crews. Others have their own facilities where workers can rest. But Keolis decided to rent hotel rooms instead.
“From a price point, it made sense for them to do it,” said VRE spokesman Mark Roeber.
Baxter could not provide the total cost Monday but called it “expensive.” The amount is included in the $85 million, five-year contract that Keolis has with VRE but makes up “a considerable part of the operation,” he said.
Train crews on the Camden and Brunswick lines of the MARC train service also stay in Washington-area hotels during the day, said MARC spokesman Terry Owens. MARC employees on the Penn Line return to an Amtrak facility in Baltimore and can go home during the downtime or use a “quiet room” there, he said. Under the VRE agreement, the hotel management company that runs the two hotels picks up the train crews each day, then drops them off in time for the return train trips.
The hotels let the train service take over an old linen room, Baxter said, where they have set up an office space with a fax and other equipment crews need to fill out paperwork each day.
The arrangement has worked out well for Keolis, he said, but also for the hotels. Because the crews are only there during the middle of the day, the hotels can re-book the rooms for the night.
