ST. MARY’S TODAY

WALDORF — While gas is guzzled in ever increasingly higher amounts of dollars per gallon the stark inaction of the area’s elected officials to bring commuter rail to Southern Maryland becomes more vivid.

Two years ago one of the most powerful Members of Congress, Maryland’s own Rep. Steny Hoyer, who is the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives and then Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley were on the campaign trail and the two were joined by area legislators while they posed on the CSX tracks in Waldorf and all promised to bring commuter rail to the region.

Senator Roy Dyson (D. St. Mary’s, Calvert, Charles), who told ST. MARY’S TODAY that he thinks politicians ought to keep the promises they make, met with Governor O’Malley last fall and reminded him of his pledge to expand Marc train service into the region on the CSX tracks.

Dyson told ST. MARY’S TODAY that the Governor insisted that despite an earlier statement by Department of Transportation officials that no commuter service would be provided to the region that it was his intention to redirect his transportation officials to keep his promise on commuter rail.

"He told me that the transportation people sometimes get it confused, they act as though the Governor works for them," said Sen. Dyson. He promised Dyson to straighten out his officials, who about three months later issued a begrudging press release announcing that the DOT would be reviewing ways to send commuter rail to the area.

The O’Malley Administration has been in office for two of the four year term to which the Governor was elected and the expectation that a politician would keep such an important promise carries with it the reasonable allowance for enough time for officials to get their act together, make a plan and follow through on the plan.

Without the benefit of any such action of plan by the O’Malley Administration, perhaps the reason is that the officials appointed by the Governor to run the Maryland Transit Administration have no prior experience at running a railroad and indeed don’t seem to be learning on the job very well.

Therefore, with the need for public mass transit growing all the time due to the high cost of gasoline as well as congestion clogging the available highways, relief needs to be found in commuter rail.

The O’Malley Administration has recently announced six new buses for Southern Maryland but Senator Dyson points out that while the bus has the advantage of being targeted to areas of employment such as NIH, the Navy Yard or downtown, the transit bus packed with riders gets stuck in backups at crash scenes just like everyone else.

The CSX tracks into Southern Maryland connect to the Marc and Amtrak mainlines at Bowie and snake down to the Potomac River at Morgantown where coal trains arrive each day to fuel the Pepco/Mirant generating plant and at the Chalk Point power plant on the Patuxent.

Looking at a map of Maryland, one can see that the CSX line from Bowie to the Potomac River parallels Rt. 301, which has become a heavy north south traffic artery as well as serving commuters from Southern Maryland to the DC and Baltimore areas.

Sen. Dyson has been advocating the use of the CSX lines for the past 8 years and has picked up the support of Sen. Mac Middleton (D. Charles), Del. Sally Jameson (D. LaPlata) as well as Del. John Bohanan (D. Lexington Park). St. Mary’s Commissioner Larry Jarboe (R. Golden Beach) has long been a supporter of running commuter trains to the area and points out that the Hughesville area would be a logical place to build commuter parking lots proposed for the Charlotte Hall area on land owned by local developers instead of next to the existing railroad right of way.

The fastest way to kill off any hope for commuter rail for Southern Maryland, which is the fastest growing region of the state is to take two tactical swipes at the idea.

One is that by providing the rail service to the region will somehow bring crime to the area.

That lunatic approach ignores the fact that first of all, we already have plenty of crime and to work towards unclogging our traffic nightmares would bring about more crime shows how stupid some of our elected officials really are…just in case you didn’t know that some of them are profoundly dumb.

We are supposed to draw the conclusion that brothers in DC will get on an early train about 4 am, go up to Union Station and board the first Amtrak leaving DC at the crack of dawn, get off at Bowie, take the train down to this area, get off and burglarize homes, and then hop a train back for the metro area with a big screen tv in tow.

This view has been held by several St. Mary’s County Commissioners and it is charitable to think that they are just dumb and not devious enough to use this far-fetched excuse to block commuter rail.

The second tactic used by the inept State Mass Transit officials is to suggest that the best route for commuter rail is to have it go up the Rt. 5 corridor to the Branch Avenue station of Metro.

Such a route would run about $3 billion and that idea will never get off the ground as Maryland will never have the money.

Listen closely when public officials mention such an idea. The person is either very clever and knows that Maryland will never have the money for the cost of such a plan or that person is very stupid.

What will work is to negotiate use of the CSX tracks that they call the Pope’s Creek Line in Southern Maryland.

CSX officials told Bohanan at a meeting in their Washington headquarters, that the railroad would require double tracking and indemnification from liability in the event of a loss.

The O’Malley Administration recently negotiated the addition of three night trains from Washington to Baltimore over CSX tracks to expand service and ought to be able to handle bringing new service to bear by adding sidings and switches to allow commuter trains to get out of the way of the money trains hauling coal for the railroad.

Since there are usually only one or two trains a day over the CSX tracks, the rush hour use by commuter trains would likely be an easy fit.

The cost of adding sidings would run about a million dollars a mile, making the cost of five such sidings between Morgantown and Bowie about a five million investment for Maryland.

That would leave the cost of equipment suitable for the task.

The Marc System presently uses locomotives and passenger coaches.

But rail experts consulted by ST. MARY’S TODAY pointed to the Rail Diesel Cars as the best way to institute service.

The cars have two diesel engines in each car, are self propelled and have a more than 50 year record of solid performance on the nation’s commuter lines. They can be run as a single car or in groups of three and can be operated from either end, making it unnecessary for trains to be turned around.

A firm in the Midwest, Farmrail, which is partnered with a Canadian company, has about 35 such RDC’s available and is currently remanufacturing the self-propelled units which were recently taken out of service in Canada after having begun their working years after being built at the Philadelphia yards of the Edward Budd Company.

The remanufacturing process takes the unit down to the frame and rebuilds every element of the car from scratch with all new wiring, engines, décor and seats. An official of Farmrail said last week that the addition of modern conveniences such as computer plug in outlets and Wifi service, music and other comforts would bring in a new rebuild at about $2 million a unit, meaning that a 3 car train would run about $6 million. Single car trains could be operated in off peak hours and only one operator for a train is needed, whether it be a one-car train or a 3-car train.

With double engines, an engine in each end of each train car, breakdowns wouldn’t mean stranded trains.

Another firm which has provided a demonstration to local officials of its self-propelled bi-level unit hasn’t been able to get off the ground while the Budd cars have proven themselves over the years.

The cost of a traditional locomotive and passenger cars could be as much as $5 million for the engine and at least a million per car.

Old cars taken out of service at Long Island or Chicago could be bought cheaply but as much as $500,000 per car may be needed to remodel them and they would still have to be pulled by a pricey locomotive, which in turn would have to be able to be switched around the train, turned and reattached at the other end.
An official of Farmrail said that the shops would be able to produce the first remanufactured train cars, which would be in excellent condition, in about a year of the order being placed.