The VRE at Fredericksburg. Courtesy VRE.
Holy crap, you guys. This is HUGE, for FXBG and all of Virginia. As a Fredericksburger, sabbaticallish VRE commuter, and urbanist, I’ve been half-following this story. Over the past couple of Democratic administrations in Richmond, the state has been planning to increase track capacity between DC and Richmond in order to make commuter and passenger rail faster, more reliable, and more frequent. There are a couple of big challenges for this project. First, most of the important track and right-of-way in Virginia are owned by freight railroads, mostly Norfolk Southern and CSX, and while they allow other trains on their tracks, they control the scheduling and the prioritization which means that passenger and commuter trains have to work around their freight trains’ schedules, and when something goes wrong with the schedule, freight trains are often prioritized, meaning that passenger and commuter rail is chronically late all around Virginia. Second, all of the tracks and rights-of-way in Virginia (and really for most of the southeastern seaboard) funnel through Arlington and onto the “Long Bridge” across the Potomac into DC, where they connect to the Northeast Corridor. The Long Bridge is over a hundred years old, and while it’s reportedly in good shape, it only has two tracks, which means it’s a huge bottleneck. It’s already operating at capacity, so no one … not VRE, not Amtrak, and not the freight railroads … can add more trains, at least peak times.
