RF&P Meltdown 7/23

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Anderson

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I'm not entirely sure what happened, but I became acutely aware of a meltdown this morning due to knock-on effects which ruined my now-weekly trip to Richmond for dinner (I catch 67 up, a friend and I have dinner, and we carpool back to Newport News). Something happened that caused 67, 89, and 79 to get stacked up somewhere south of FBG; 67 was late enough that the departure of 66 got forced back by an hour.
 
Ah so! With the "&" I should have been smart enough to figure out it was a railroad and Googled it. But I wasn't. :blink:
 
Exactly. You don't even have to surmise anything based on the &. If you simply googled RF&P without knowing anything about it you would have landed up with the following as the first entry returned from the search:

Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad - Wikipedia

Wikipedia

The RF&P was a bridge line, with a slogan of "Linking North & South," on a system that stretched about 113 miles. Until around 1965 RF&P originated less than ...
Trust me. Try it. you might even like it :p

I use this secret technique to answer more than half the questions posed by people who are too lazy to look up the answers themselves, if I don;t already know the answer off the top of y head, specially the relatively shallow questions like this one. For deeper questions and analyses personal knowledge starts playing a more significant part.
 
Actually, even though I love poking around in Wikipedia, I often ask you guys for an answer about rail because I know it will be accurate, detailed, and informative and come from experts rather than a general website. :) Take it as a compliment that people come to you first! :p
 
Don't get me wrong. I do like to answer deeper questions that involve something more than taking the trouble to type in 5 letters to google. But asking what RF&P is without even trying that is not my idea of a deep question. There is no more correct answer to what RF&P stands for than what one gets from googling it.

Now if someone were asking about the role playewd by RF&P in the development of north-south passenger service and how it worked pre-Amtrak etc., that's a different matter and worthy of discussion.
 
Okay--I understand, jis. Sort of like me being an editor and telling people to look up a word in the dictionary before asking me what it means, but being glad to elaborate on the history of the word and how and why it got into the language. :)

And now I feel like putting my work aside and looking up the history of the RF&P--I should never go into this forum at lunchtime if I have a deadline to meet! :p
 
Yes Mystic. That just about sums it up.

One interesting thing about the RF&P is that a significant portion of it was owned by the State of Virginia at one time, but that was before it had figured out that it will have a traffic problem. So very cleverly they sold it off and eventually it went to CSX.

The entire discussion about Washington - Richmond HSR would have been completely different today had Virginia not been as short sighted back then as they were. But then again, it may be hard to blame them since no on e back then seemed to believe that passenger rail would survive, Another area where American public opinion has been wrong based on wishful thinking rather than careful consideration of reality.
 
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Yes Mystic. That just about sums it up.

One interesting thing about the RF&P is that a significant portion of it was owned by the State of Virginia at one time, but that was before it had figured out that it will have a traffic problem. So very cleverly they sold it off and eventually it went to CSX.

The entire discussion about Washington - Richmond HSR would have been completely different today had Virginia not been as short sighted back then as they were. But then again, it may be hard to blame them since no on e back then seemed to believe that passenger rail would survive, Another area where American public opinion has been wrong based on wishful thinking rather than careful consideration of reality.
Well, in 1990 Virginia was more interested in developing Potomac Yard than in passenger rail planning. So the deal that was cut was that the state got the (by then obsolete) yards in Alexandria to develop. I think the state may have also gotten most of the VRE slots in the deal (the RF&P went away in 1991 and VRE started in 1992) so I don't think they did horribly in the deal...but at the same time you're right about how different it could have been. Then again, there are so many points things could have gone differently (look up the Richmond and Chesapeake Bay Railroad for a really interesting point transportation in VA could have gone another way)...
 
I'm not entirely sure what happened, but I became acutely aware of a meltdown this morning due to knock-on effects which ruined my now-weekly trip to Richmond for dinner (I catch 67 up, a friend and I have dinner, and we carpool back to Newport News). Something happened that caused 67, 89, and 79 to get stacked up somewhere south of FBG; 67 was late enough that the departure of 66 got forced back by an hour.
It has been a lousy month for delays between ALX and Petersburg for many of the Amtrak trains. Don't know how much of the delays were due to heat related speed restrictions, track work, or freight train congestion. Slow orders due to heat restriction are a problem since Virginia does tend to have hot days during the summer. ;) Have you heard anything about VA DRPT and VRE looking at paying CSX for track de-stressing to raise the temperature thresholds for implementing slow orders? Adding a 3rd track and upgrading track speeds to 90 mph is going to be of limited value in the summer if slow orders have to issued every time there is a moderately hot day.
 
I think Virginia needs to start working on getting CSX to cede control of at least two passenger tracks to Virginia. There is no hope of running any reasonable 21st century passenger service with CSX managing the tracks I think.
 
I think Virginia needs to start working on getting CSX to cede control of at least two passenger tracks to Virginia. There is no hope of running any reasonable 21st century passenger service with CSX managing the tracks I think.
From what I heard at the VHSR lunch talking with some folks, my understanding is the following:

(1) CSX wants separate tracks on routes that have a lot of passenger traffic. This isn't an issue (I think VA wants this as well; at the moment, the plan is one dedicated passenger track plus some sharing and sidings).

(2) CSX wants a significant amount of separation between the passenger tracks and freight tracks. This is an issue, since in a lot of places the ROW is not wide enough to fit 3-4 tracks plus a wide separation between them. The RF&P line is, with the exceptions of Ashland and Fredericksburg (both towns on the southern end of the line which pre-dated the line), mostly wide enough for four tracks. Most of it was quad-tracked in the past: Per Wikipedia, at the end of 1970 the railroad had 518 track miles on 118 route miles...or just under an average of 4.4 track miles per route mile. Even accounting for Acca and Potomac Yards getting some of this, you can "burn" close to 50 track miles in the yards and on extra sidings and still get the whole thing quad-tracked with that mileage. However, the ROW is not wide enough to jam a mass of track separation in between two sets of two tracks.
 
Would CSX be amenable to just having two passenger tracks elevated above their freight tracks. Quite a bit of high quality passenger track is built on existing ROW in this way at various places elsewhere in the world. That would give them their big separation too as long as they can keep their trains from falling over and damaging structures, which of course may be a hard to meet requirement for them.
 
Would CSX be amenable to just having two passenger tracks elevated above their freight tracks. Quite a bit of high quality passenger track is built on existing ROW in this way at various places elsewhere in the world. That would give them their big separation too as long as they can keep their trains from falling over and damaging structures, which of course may be a hard to meet requirement for them.
My gut (and this is only my gut) says that doing so isn't practical for cost. It's not just the raised tracks at issue...you've got bridges and tunnels to deal with in various places. Add to that the sheer cost of dozens of miles of elevated track and cost is a very real problem.

On the other end of things, the sheer liability situation if one of their trains tips over while a couple of passenger trains are overhead would not be pretty (I'm imagining an Amfleet-at-110 version of the Bay Bridge collapse).
 
The cost of elevated track has not been a problem in rest of the world where necessary. But of course we know we are exceptional :p

For this and various other reasons about the general lay of the ROW I think General MAS of 90mph on the ALX - RVR segment is a pipe dream that I will believe when it actually happens if ever.
 
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RF&P was not quad tracked. It was always double tracked in the "modern" age. The figure of 518 track miles for the 118 mile railroad must have included all secondary tracks in Acca (Richmond) Yard, Alexandria Yard, the Dahlgren Branch, and all other secondary tracks throughout the RF&P.

If you watch closely while traveling on the RF&P, you can see evidence of numerous track relocations that were performed over the years. It's easier to see this in the winter, when the leaves are off the trees. A good example is the area between Aquia and Fredericksburg, where the old right-of-way can often be seen. By around the year 1900, the line had been double-tracked. I understand the civil engineers anticipated the eventual addition of a third track on the east side. More recently, several VRE stations have been built. You guessed it: VRE built the stations on the east side at places like Lorton, Woodbridge, Rippon, and Brooke. Of course, building them on the west side would have allowed construction of the third track in the location that was planned for it. But now that would possibly require the removal or relocation of those stations.

To be fair, I have to admit that there may have been good reasons for some of these decisions. But I have to wonder. And I have to wonder whether future decisions regarding this line will be made with any more care.

Tom
 
Yesterday was pretty mild, mid-60's to mid-80's so not too much temperature swing either.
CSX is known for waiting a day or two before removing heat restrictions to allow for temperature swings.
 
  • Does anyone know how the third track project from Arkendale and north is progressing?
 
Famous scene in 1958 romantic comedy "Houseboat" (Cary Grant and Sophia Loren) when an RF&P passenger train splits a house in two that was stuck on the tracks.
 
From what I heard at the VHSR lunch talking with some folks, my understanding is the following:

(1) CSX wants separate tracks on routes that have a lot of passenger traffic. This isn't an issue (I think VA wants this as well; at the moment, the plan is one dedicated passenger track plus some sharing and sidings).

(2) CSX wants a significant amount of separation between the passenger tracks and freight tracks. This is an issue, since in a lot of places the ROW is not wide enough to fit 3-4 tracks plus a wide separation between them.
This is the addled view from CSX which has caused so much trouble in New York State. I am not surprised to hear the same damn thing in Virginia.
In Denver, similarly stupid separation requests by UP were responded to with "we can't do the separation, but we'll put up a concrete wall between our tracks and yours, so you have no plausible complaints about risk" response by Denver RTD. Perhaps that's the correct response.'

In the end Denver didn't even have to build the concrete wall.
 
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That would give them their big separation too as long as they can keep their trains from falling over and damaging structures, which of course may be a hard to meet requirement for them.
This is the problem with CSX. They want room to undermaintain their tracks and routinely derail freight trains off of them. Which is not a reasonable request.
 
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