VRE: off to a good start - Virginia Railway Express commuter train

Railway Age, Sept, 1992 by WIlliam D. Middleton

It was a few minutes after sunrise, early on a hazy summer morning in late July. At the Manassas, Va., station, automobiles circled through the station drive, pausing to allow a work-bound spouse to be dropped off with a hasty good-bye kiss. Other commuters parked in the station lot, and walked across the tracks to the Sandwich Factory lunch counter and news stand to pick up a cup of hot coffee and a Washington Post. As train time approached, brief-case-carrying commuters gathered in expectant knots on the platform. Promptly at 6:32 a.m., a shiny Virginia Railway Express (VRE) train braked to a brief halt, gathered up its commuter cargo, and then moved off through the Virginia countryside towards Washington. At a dozen other stations up and down VRE's Manassas and Fredericksburg lines, other commuters were going through similar activities as they began their morning journey to the nation's capital.

These early morning scenes are typical of commuter rail suburbs everywhere in North America, and so normal did they appear that one might have thought that these Northern Virginia commuters had been following this well-ordered routine for years on end. In reality, commuter railroading was scarcely a month old in Virginia, and VRE's daily riders were only days or weeks removed from the grueling ordeal of home-to-work travel in the congested, stop-and-go lanes of I-66 or I-95. Despite the newness of the operation, the VRE trains were running well, and Northern Virginia commuters were taking to their new service in gratifying numbers.

* Reason to celebrate. America's newest commuter rail service had been a long time in coming, and Northern Virginians celebrated its inauguration in rare fashion at the Broad Run/Airport station on June 12. The Osbourn High School Symphonic Band played. Virginia Governor L. Douglas Wilder capped a long list of speakers, conducted a ceremonial ribbon cutting, and then joined the enthusiastic crowd of close to a thousand that boarded two of the brand new trains for an inaugural round trip to Alexandria. Regular service began a little over a week later, on June 22, over the 36-mile line between Washington Union Station and Manassas. A month later, on July 20, VRE trains began operating over the 62-mile route between Washington and Fredericksburg.

Both of Virginia's new rail lines were quickly off to a good start. By the beginning of July, Manassas Line trains were carrying a daily ridership that totaled more than 1,500 trips, and the line hit a total daily ridership of 2,000 for the first time on July 14. Fredericksburg Line trains got off to an even better start, reaching a daily total of 2,000 trips by the beginning of their second week.

By late August, ridership for the two lines had climbed to a daily average of 4,400, and on August 21, the VRE board voted to explore the feasibility of adding midday trains on both lines. Either one or two additional trips on each line, which could begin running as early as November, were being considered.

The new service was not without a few problems in its first weeks. Dispatching, train control, and mechanical problems delayed a number of trains. And the trains had hardly begun to operate over the Manassas Line when service was shut down for three days because of the national rail shutdown. At the end of July, an signal cable cut accidentally by construction workers delayed several VRE trains as much as 3-1/2 hours.

Despite the problems, the two lines were off to a remarkably good start in providing the kind of service reliability that will be needed to build a successful operation. At the end of July, Manassas Line trains were marking up a 93.5% on-time performance, while Fredericksburg Line trains were close behind with an 89% on-time performance at the end of their first two weeks of operation. By late August, the service was running with an average on-time performance of 93.8%.

"We'd be at over 99% on-time performance based upon just the factors under our control," says VRE director of operations Thomas R. Waldron. "We've had excellent performance from our equipment and from our Amtrak crews." "Both revenues and ridership were a little ahead of our expectations for July," says Waldron, "and we expect to see a significant increase after Labor Day, when the vacation season is over.

"We've projected that ridership will reach a total of 4,500 daily round trips by the end of the first year of operation, and our growth thus far indicates that we will meet this. However, it all comes down to reliability. We won't meet our numbers if we don't get well into the 90s in on-time performance. We have to be sure that all elements of the system, whether they're under our control or not, are looked after properly."

* The long road 10 start-up. Planning for Virginia's long-awaited commuter rail service goes back over several decades, but it was not until the mid-1980s that real progress began to be made. A 1984 study by R.L. Banks & Associates for the Washington Area Council of Governments formed the basis for a planned service that was taken up by the Northern Virginia and Potomac and Rappahannock transportation commissions, representing eight cities and counties in Northern Virginia, together with the Virginia Department of Transportation.