Amtrak Braces for Capital Shutdown as Freight Volumes Gather Pace

Amtrak will cut direct rail links between Washington and Virginia for nine days from Friday, adding to pressure on the Northeast Corridor. Meanwhile, the nation’s freight railroads posted a sharp jump in weekly volumes.

The national passenger railroad will close the A-Interlocking in the First Street Tunnel, just south of Washington Union Station, after service ends on Oct. 16. It will reopen before trains run on the morning of Oct. 26. The interlocking’s switches and crossovers are beyond their service life and currently hold trains to 10 miles an hour. Crews will replace them, rebuild the tunnel track bed and install modern electric switches.

The work disrupts Northeast Regional trains and long-distance services including the Crescent, Silver Meteor, Palmetto and Cardinal. Amtrak Virginia trains will terminate in Alexandria, with timed bus connections into the capital. Virginia Railway Express will run a modified schedule that skips Union Station. Service north of Washington to New York and Boston is unaffected.

The outage comes while New York-bound travelers are already dealing with cutbacks. Since Oct. 10, Amtrak and NJ Transit have been running on a single track between Newark and Secaucus while they finish the Portal North Bridge cutover. That has reduced weekday trains into Penn Station until Nov. 16.

Freight, by contrast, is picking up speed. US rail traffic rose 7.2% from a year earlier to 534,256 carloads and intermodal units in the week ending Oct. 10, according to the Association of American Railroads. Intermodal volume climbed 10.4% to 302,252 containers and trailers, and carloads rose 3.4%, with eight of 10 commodity groups higher.

Traffic for the first 40 weeks of the year is up 3.6%. The figures arrive as Union Pacific Corp. pursues its takeover of Norfolk Southern Corp., a deal that would create the country’s first coast-to-coast railroad and awaits a federal ruling expected next year.