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So. Md. Commuter Rail Starting To Look

Good As Gas Climbs to $3 Gallon

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By Kenneth C. Rossignol
ST. MARY’S TODAY

HUGHESVILLE ---- As the Hughesville bypass nears completion, those motorists daring to glance from the lane in front of them will start to notice what our elected officials have known for some time: a mile of the railroad right-of-way has been appropriated by the Maryland State Highway Administration for construction of the widening of Rt. 5.
All the while that local officials have been giving lip service to future rail service over the former U.S. Navy Railroad which linked the existing CSX railroad to Pax River Naval Air Station at Lexington Park, a vital part of that rail bed has once again been uprooted.
During the 1980’s and 90’s, a procession of near-sighted St. Mary’s Commissioners, diluted of any vision for the future beyond the papers in front of them, signed away countless numbers of easements across the county-owned rail line. Their actions made the cost of an eventual construction of commuter rail service into St. Mary’s more expensive.
Restoring the right-of-way removed from the rail line for the Hughesville highway construction can still be accomplished, yet the shortsighted act by the State Highway Administration means that once again taxpayers will pace the price of ill-talented planners and, up to now, the lack of any coherent transportation plan for Southern Maryland.
In 1998, Senator Roy Dyson (D. Charles, St. Mary’s, Calvert) sponsored a bill to protect the 100-year-old railroad right-of-way and thereby propelling commuter rail headlong into the present.
The bill, which passed the General Assembly and was signed into law by Gov. Parris Glendening, required the Department of Transportation to conduct a feasibility study into preserving the railroad right of way for future commuter rail use.
The study was funded and conducted, ending with a report which called for the rail bed to be preserved with a variety of methods and stressed the importance of the St. Mary’s Commissioners to end the practice of granting easements over the right-of-way.
While Lexington Park once had trains running each week to town, the trains stopped in the late 1950’s.
Meanwhile, the freight trains continued to roll into Charles County to supply coal to electric power generating plants located at Chalk Point on the Patuxent River and at Morgantown on the Potomac, adjacent to the Gov. Harry Nice Rt. 301 Bridge.
A rail line from the Morgantown branch which paralells Rt. 301, branches off at White Plains to Indian Head. A proposal to run dinner trains on that line fizzled five years ago.
Now that traffic is rolling a little easier through Hughesville, the backups, crashes and congestion continue to worsen at Charlotte Hall and Mechanicsville, making more bypasses seem likely.
Commuter buses continue to fill as quickly as they appear at the region’s parking lots while the price stickers on local gas stations continue to soar to the $3 per gallon mark.
This past year the most significant achievement for the advancement of commuter rail took place, that of a pledge by Governor Martin O’Malley, during the election campaign, to bring commuter rail to Southern Maryland.
O’Malley, Congressman Steny Hoyer (D. Md. 5th) and the area’s legislative delegation pledged to bring commuter rail to Southern Maryland, utilizing the existing CSX tracks.
One of O’Malley’s first moves to bring that goal about was to replace the paltry $100,000 to fund the transportation study sponsored by Southern Maryland’s three Senators and most of the region’s delegates, with a big boost in spending on the effort, to $4 million.
St. Mary’s Commissioner Larry Jarboe (R. Golden Beach), has been a longtime supporter to build commuter rail service to the region and now that he is the Tri-County Council Chairman, is determined to have the region’s commuters on rails instead of choking in traffic while the cost of gas soars.
The effort by Sen. Dyson to have the state build a second span over the Patuxent River at Solomon’s Island has finally caught fire and is being advanced by funds for design and planning.
No Contingency Plan for Another Bridge Closure
The Gov. Thomas Johnson Bridge, which carries Rt. 4 over from Calvert to St. Mary’s was opened to traffic in 1976 and in 1988 was closed for nearly three months due to cracks in the giant support beams which hold the bridge in the air. Repairs were made to the bridge by wrapping large steel bands around the tops of the towers and traffic was finally reopened.
Should another crisis occur and the bridge is shut down again, the public will find out that twenty years later the State Highway Administration still does not have a contingency plan for moving the heavy traffic on Rt. 4, according to Del. John Bohanan (D. Lexington Park).
In 1988, the lack of any emergency plans by SHA left commuters helpless to get to work at Pax River or home to areas north of the bridge.
That year, the State of Maryland assembled a ragtag group of vessels capable of carrying from up to 30 passengers at a time, to ferry foot traffic back and forth across the Patuxent. Parking lots at the bridge approach were arranged on the abandoned highway and school buses were hired that summer to bring folks from Lexington Park to the bridge ferryboat parking. Businesses at Solomon’s Island which depended on patrons from the St. Mary’s side of the river died on the vine as the village turned into a ghost town. The only thing missing from the scene was tumbleweed blowing down the island.
With traffic as much as ten times heavier now than in 1988, there are no plans for car ferries to carry traffic and Maryland officials would be hard pressed to quickly find sufficient vessels to move but a few hundred people back and forth each day.
The economic impact of the bridge closing once again could be disastrous to the region.
The region can’t handle the traffic on Rt. 301 and no one can agree on routes for a bypass around Waldorf.
The congestion on Rt. 5 in Leonardtown leaves that small town choking even though a bypass was opened ten years ago. A new state highway study of the Rt. 4 corridor between Lusby and Solomon’s is yet another example of the shotgun approach of transportation planning in the region.
The same developers who have been pushing unlimited growth for the area, are among the first to decry commuter rail lines. Some who oppose commuter rail warn that criminals will use the railroad to escape back to DC after committing robberies. One can conjure up images of armed robbers waiting on the 6 pm train in order to flee police.
But the people making decisions about commuter rail are often parochial politicians who think that commuters will be robbers instead of folks carrying laptops and ipods.
Maryland currently operates MARC train service for the entire state, except Southern Maryland, with trains serving Anne Arundel, Baltimore County, Baltimore City, Prince Georges County, Harford, Montgomery and Frederick counties. Maryland trains actually go into West Virginia to Martinsburg and are proposed to extend to Delaware as well.
The cost of building light rail service up Rt. 5 to Branch Avenue is prohibitive but using MARC train service along the existing CSX tracks is possible.
In a meeting with Bohanan and other officials at the CSX offices in Washington in 2003, the company said that it would require double tracking and indemnity for the railroad from the State of Maryland in order to accommodate passenger trains. The company said it had to have unobstructed passage for it’s freight trains which must proceed to the power plants.
As officials attempt to deal with possible terror threats to the nation, the continued operation of freight trains under the nation’s capital downtown mall area poses great risk. An incident in the train tunnel near the US Capitol building could close the downtown for months. Rerouting freight shipments around the city would be impossible without construction of new rail bridges across the Potomac River.
Construction of a new Potomac River Rt. 301 bridge at Morgantown is essential and could accommodate a double deck bridge with rail traffic included in the new river crossing and giving an outside the city freight route.
Sen. Mac Middleton (D. Charles) bemoans that possibility by saying that such a change could mean up to 30 trains a day through Waldorf. The senator did pledge to seek commuter rail service to the area despite his lack of enthusiasm for expanded freight train traffic.
The Rt. 5 / Mattawoman Beantown Road bypass which was built 10 years ago failed to include an overpass, in another colossal shortsighted act on the part of the State Highway Administration.
When Sen. Dyson, along with Middleton and Senate President Mike Miller (D. Calvert, PG), sponsored and passed the bill for the transportation study, the first comprehensive planning session sought by the region, then-Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich vetoed the bill, which was then overridden by the General Assembly.