Results tagged “amtrak”

Amtrak and MARC Penn Line service has been suspended between Baltimore and D.C. since 7:45 a.m., thanks to a major water main break affecting tracks between the BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport and Baltimore Penn stations. Amtrak reports that tracks in the area are covered with mud, trees and other debris. Service restoration is not expected until at least noon today, and could be hours later. There's literally no alternative rail service between the two cities, so if you had plans to travel north from D.C. via train this morning, you ought to look into a bus. You can call 800-USA-RAIL for train status updates later in the day.

Vice President-Elect Joe Biden is a well-known train geek, so we have to assume he was involved in the decision for him and President-Elect Barack Obama to arrive in Washington on Jan. 17 via Amtrak. Sure, the Lincoln-loving Obama says he's replicating his presidential hero's journey to Washington by starting out in Philadelphia and stopping in Baltimore on his way, but Biden made the fact that he rides the train between D.C. and Wilmington almost every day one of his talking points during the campaign, so the symbolism works for both of them rather nicely.

Don't get too excited just yet, but this story from the Washington Times is bound to make those of you who travel between D.C. and New York City on a regular basis salivate. The federal government plans to announce it is seeking contractors to build a new $30 billion to $40 billion high-speed rail line between Washington and New York that would be used exclusively by passenger trains. Now, Congress still has to vote to fund such a project, so this is clearly many, many years away. But if it does eventually happen, the bottom line would be that you could get from D.C. to NYC on Amtrak in under two hours. The very idea gives us goosebumps.

We've chronicled photographer harassment in the D.C. area, most recently at Union Station, where amateur photogs have encountered great confusion as to who owns which portions of the station and shops, where those sections end, and what rules apply to photographers in each one. Tomorrow, the Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Managment of the U.S. House of Representatives, chaired by D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, will try to find answers to those questions in a hearing at 10 a.m. Representatives from the Union Station companies will testify, as well as the Director of D.C.'s Department of Transportation, and notably, one of our Flickr contributors who has pursued this issue relentlessly, Erin McCann (PDF). The hearing will be webcast live; you can also catch a report afterward by Flickr user LightboxDC, who will be in attendance.

We all know the effect that levels of federal funding have on transit around here (and, obviously, around the country). One only has to look to the way that the Federal Transit Administration has handled the development of the proposed Purple and Silver Lines to see it - public services toyed with by the fickle madam that is federal appropriations. Without the cash from the Feds (however small that apportionment may be), not much seems to get done in the world of mass transit - it's sad, but true.

This is pretty good: Fox 5's Tom Fitzgerald decided to do a report on the ongoing harassment of photographers inside D.C.'s busy Union Station, a topic we've written about and heard about from our own Flickr contributors many times before. While he was there interviewing Amtrak's spokesperson on the subject, who in fact told the reporter that photography is absolutely allowed inside the Amtrak portion of the station, a security guard came up to the Fox 5 crew and told them turn their cameras off. You can watch the report here.

Hopefully, you didn't miss us too much last week. But it seems that we weren't the only transit columnists that got stuck on Amtrak during last weekend's travel.

The Associated Press is reporting that all Amtrak and NJ Transit trains between Philadelphia and New York's Penn Station were stalled for about 90 minutes this afternoon because of electrical power problems.

Metro's board will be holding a full public hearing today on the future of the city's most circulated lines, the 30s. The current set of six routes run east to west along Pennsylvania and Wisconsin Avenues, and carry over 20,000 passengers a day from residential areas in Northwest and Southeast to downtown commercial districts - but unfortunately, the routes suffer from a lot of stops and gos along the way, stalling pick up times and elongating rides.