Amtrak Is Closing the Doorway to Washington for Eleven Days

Amtrak has told Virginia passengers to expect cancellations, route changes and bus substitutions from 16 October, when the railroad suspends service between Virginia and Washington DC for eleven days. The work runs through 26 October and is part of a programme Amtrak has branded Pause for Progress: replacing aging track components at the A interlocking, the control point immediately outside Washington Union Station where the lines from the south converge. Every train between Virginia and the Northeast Corridor passes through it, which is exactly why it cannot be fixed while trains are running.

An interlocking is the arrangement of switches and signals that lets trains cross between tracks, and A interlocking is one of the most heavily used in the country. Its components have been carrying Northeast Regional, Virginia-supported state services, long-distance trains to the Southeast and commuter traffic for decades. When a switch there fails — and they have — the result is not a local delay but a corridor-wide one, because there is no practical way around it. The eleven-day closure is the cost of not having a summer of unplanned single-day closures instead.

For travellers the substitution details will decide how bad this feels. Bus bridges around a closed segment add time and remove the one thing rail passengers actually pay for, which is the ability to work or sleep between cities. Anyone with a fixed commitment in Washington during that window — a hearing, a conference, a flight from National — should treat the published schedule as provisional and consider whether the trip can move by a week in either direction. Fares on the shoulder dates around a known closure tend to rise as displaced passengers rebook.

The wider context is that the Northeast Corridor is in the middle of a decade of this. Between the Baltimore and Potomac tunnel replacement, the Hudson tunnel project, the WALK Bridge in Connecticut and now A interlocking, the busiest passenger railway in North America is being rebuilt around live traffic, and the bill is paid in weekends and shutdown windows. Expect more of them, announced further in advance, and get in the habit of checking before booking rather than after.

Sources: Virginia Mercury, Amtrak Media