• Silver Line Dulles WMATA Metrorail progress/pictures

  • Discussion related to DC area passenger rail services from Northern Virginia to Baltimore, MD. Includes Light Rail and Baltimore Subway.
Discussion related to DC area passenger rail services from Northern Virginia to Baltimore, MD. Includes Light Rail and Baltimore Subway.

Moderators: mtuandrew, therock, Robert Paniagua

  by farecard
 
I've long thought WMATA should have thought far enough ahead to, on outside dual platform stations, have a center passing track. Such would allow an express to pass a local in the station.

And the majority of stalled trains are at a station, with brake or door issues. With a passing track, that wouldn't paralyze the entire line.
  by Sand Box John
 
farecard
I've long thought WMATA should have thought far enough ahead to, on outside dual platform stations, have a center passing track. Such would allow an express to pass a local in the station.


The majority of stations are island platform resulting in a third track only being useful in twin platform stations. In most cases the alignment beyond the those twin platform station doesn't have a long enough tangent to build the interlockings to connect the third track to the mainline tracks.
  by RandallW
 
farecard wrote: Sat Oct 29, 2022 11:32 am And the majority of stalled trains are at a station, with brake or door issues. With a passing track, that wouldn't paralyze the entire line.
I was once on a crowded train where the operator tried closing the doors three times, but couldn't because people were blocking one of the doors from being closed. He was reasonably nice (I thought the whole time), but before he tried the fourth time the announcement was "if you don't stand back from the doors, I will have remove everyone from the train, and take it out of service because the doors won't close. Let's try this again." Somehow the next time the doors did close without issue and we continued.
  by sextant
 
Putting a Airport 40 miles from the City Center of DC was a huge mistake to begin with. This does not make any sense then...It takes like a hour and half to get out there in normal Dc traffic.//Dulles only made sense to Northern VA Developers
  by JDC
 
YOLO wrote: Mon Oct 31, 2022 12:32 pm Metro has set the opening date for Tuesday November 15
I made the trek from Springfield to Whiele for opening day of phase 1 and was on the first train to carry customers. I had planned to go to opening day for phase 2 (less than 2 miles from where I now live) with my son who was too young to bring along the first time. Alas the misses will be having surgery the 14th so I'll be unable to attend opening day festivities.
  by YOLO
 
JDC wrote: Mon Oct 31, 2022 2:17 pm
YOLO wrote: Mon Oct 31, 2022 12:32 pm Metro has set the opening date for Tuesday November 15
I made the trek from Springfield to Whiele for opening day of phase 1 and was on the first train to carry customers. I had planned to go to opening day for phase 2 (less than 2 miles from where I now live) with my son who was too young to bring along the first time. Alas the misses will be having surgery the 14th so I'll be unable to attend opening day festivities.
I would like to check out the new stations on opening day as well but im not interested in getting up early in the morning :P
  by scratchyX1
 
sextant wrote: Mon Oct 31, 2022 1:01 pm Putting a Airport 40 miles from the City Center of DC was a huge mistake to begin with. This does not make any sense then...It takes like a hour and half to get out there in normal Dc traffic.//Dulles only made sense to Northern VA Developers
A Huge mistake is letting the Wo&d go. On the original metro planning maps, its marked as "electric commuter railroad ".
having biked the trail, there would have been considerable work to get that to metro standards.
I'm not sure a transfer would have worked.
  by RandallW
 
The W&OD wasn't let go. The state of Virginia moved so rapidly to destroy it that between the petition to abandon the railroad being filed and the hearing that the ICC was presented with a fait accompli that couldn't be undone. (The W&OD was used to move materials to build Dulles and then destroyed to build I-66 in the Falls Church area.)
  by JDC
 
So far Metro has not announced any big hoopla for the opening, but I expect there will be something more than what's so far announced - the handing out of the traditional pennants at each new station that day. I have one from Phase I's opening, so even if I cannot ride that day maybe I'll swing by Ashburn and grab a pennant as I go back/forth to see the misses.
  by perfbill
 
The real villain with the W&OD situation goes back to J.P. Morgan. He formed the Southern Railway Company in the 1890s, and started absorbing rail lines (including the one that had been started in Southern Pennsylvania and eventually became the route for the PA Turnpike). Once they had taken in the Washington and Old Dominion, which at that point had gone to Bluemont, Morgan, or at least one of his staff, ensured that this would be the end of the line so they could not go to Winchester and connect with the mainline in the Shenandoah Valley. There was a viable route to do this, but they never got the chance.

As this decreased the viability of the railroad, dooming it to the status of local short line, they could never get the momentum going to be of any major importance. So, it hauled grain, milk and passengers. They tried to dump passengers around 1940, but when WWII started they had to pick them up again due to wartime shortages and transportation issues due to rationing. Just about when they could have shut down around 1959, Dwight Eisenhower, who literally was the one that chose the Loudoun County airport site over one near Burke, changed all that. The W&OD was now a primary mover for building materials to the Herndon station, about 2.5 miles from airport property. The line was important again for three years, but Route 28 north of Chantilly was rerouted to the current alignment, further negating the need for the train.

It stopped operating in 1966 and they pulled track in 1967. A stretch of it in Arlington was snapped up by the state or the feds to build 66 between East Falls Church and Spout Run. The rest obviously became the park.

To make it viable for Metro, it would have to be about three times as wide as the current path, have several over/underpasses built (the bike trail usually goes over or under now, of course), and possibly ditch some houses through eminent domain. Since the Dulles Access Road was constructed with a rail system in mind, and the W&OD skirts the northern end of the property by more than three miles, not really a contender.

I think I got most of the facts correct on this, but open to clarification or correction. And as Morgan probably set, "It's not personal. It's business.

"OK, it's also personal!"
  by YOLO
 
JDC wrote: Tue Nov 01, 2022 9:21 am So far Metro has not announced any big hoopla for the opening, but I expect there will be something more than what's so far announced - the handing out of the traditional pennants at each new station that day. I have one from Phase I's opening, so even if I cannot ride that day maybe I'll swing by Ashburn and grab a pennant as I go back/forth to see the misses.
I wish i got the pennant from the 2015 opening. Showed up way too late and they were all gone
  by sextant
 
scratchyX1 wrote: Mon Oct 31, 2022 9:03 pm
sextant wrote: Mon Oct 31, 2022 1:01 pm Putting a Airport 40 miles from the City Center of DC was a huge mistake to begin with. This does not make any sense then...It takes like a hour and half to get out there in normal Dc traffic.//Dulles only made sense to Northern VA Developers
At the time in 1966 DC was a small city of 500,000 people and most of Northern VA was open fields, Rosslyn has a corner gas station and not much else. People in NOVA were still using outhouses has sewer and water had not made it out there yet. I actualy got off the W&OD trail in the 1990s and ask to use a bathroom at somebodys house near a subdivision and that actuly had a Outhouse next to a 200,000 home

A Huge mistake is letting the Wo&d go. On the original metro planning maps, its marked as "electric commuter railroad ".
having biked the trail, there would have been considerable work to get that to metro standards.
I'm not sure a transfer would have worked.
  by perfbill
 
More fun. From what I read in one of my W&OD books, it is possibly the only railroad in the United States that ran on virtually every possible power. They started out with wood, went eventually to coal, had an oil burner at one point, used both gasoline and diesel engines on some franken-boxcars they custom built, and had electrical from the 1920 into perhaps the 1950s. All that is missing is cables and cogs. They had a mix of motorized and electrical during that Depression/war period.

And the airport seemed to make sense at that time, especially when they had a special access road to take it from the newly completed beltway right up to the terminal.

28 used to be routed roughly along Centerville Road and Elden Street to Dranesville prior to 1962, and went very close to the Herndon station, so that also made sense. The current alignment north of Chantilly was constructed along with the airport up to route 7, and renumbered 28 when it reached that terminus. I recall back in the 1980s when I first moved here that it was still a 2-lane road with signals all the way from Centerville, including a signal at the bottom of a hill you didn't want to traverse in ice down to a signal at route 7. Given the growth of Ashburn at that time, THAT'S when this extension would have made sense, given 8-mile backups from Route 7 onto the 2-lanes each direction toll road past Elden Street. That, or put passengers back on the W&OD line down to Rosslyn (which had a streetcar across the bridge into Georgetown).

And here we are a mere four decades later.
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