Central Virginia
Virginia Passenger Rail Authority
Board of Directors Meeting 8/27/2026
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Board of Directors Meeting
8/27/2026
Attachments
August Board Meeting Minutes.pdf
August Board Meeting Agenda.pdf
May Board Meeting Minutes.pdf
1. Call to Order
2. Safety Briefing
3. Welcome and Introduction of New Board Members
4. Roll Call Attendance
5. Public Comment
6. Approval of Meeting Minutes
Action: Approve minutes from May 21, 2026
7. Annual Governance Requirements
Annual Governance Requirements.pdf
Action: Annual Election of Officers
Decision Brief – Officer Elections.pdf
Resolution – Officer Elections.pdf
Action: Virginia Passenger Rail Authority Committee Assignments
Decision Brief – Committee Assignments.pdf
Resolution – Committee Assignments.pdf
Action: Adoption of Remote Participation and All Virtual Meeting Policy
Decision Brief – Remote Participation and All Virtual Meeting Policy.pdf
Resolution – Remote Participation and All Virtual Policy.pdf
8. Executive Director’s Report
Executive Director’s Report.pdf
9. FY27 Budget Amendment and Management Reserve
FY27 Budget Amendment and Management Reserve.pdf
Decision Brief – FY27 Budget and Management Reserve.pdf
Resolution – FY27 Budget Amendment and Management Reserve.pdf
Action: Approval of FY27 Budget Amendment and Approval of Management Reserve Balance
10. Amtrak 209 Operating Agreement
Amtrak 209 Operating Agreement.pdf
Decision Brief – Amtrak 209 Agreement.pdf
Resolution – Amtrak 209 Agreement.pdf
Action: Authority to Execute FY27 209 Agreement
11. Federal and State Legislative Updates
Federal and State Legislative Updates.pdf
12. Lunch
13. Project and Construction Updates
Project Updates.pdf
August 2026 Construction Updates.pdf
14. Service Performance Updates
Service Performance Updates.pdf
15. Closed Session Executive Director Annual Performance Review
16. Action Regarding Executive Director
Action: Performance Year Adjectival Rating and Salary Adjustment
Decision Brief – Performance Year Adjectival Rating.pdf
Resolution – Performance Year Adjectival Rating.pdf
17. Wrap-up/Adjournment
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:00:01
Good morning.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:00:05
We call to order our August 27th meeting of the VPRA Board of Directors, and we will start with a safety briefing before we get into the agenda.
SPEAKER_16
00:00:34
Chair and Executive Director, members of the board, good morning.
00:00:37
Good morning.
00:00:38
All right, let's go.
00:00:40
If you don't know, my name is LaVara Bates, safety director for VPRA.
00:00:44
Let's begin our briefing.
00:00:46
We are located at 919 East Main Street, over on the fourth floor in the Piedmont Road.
00:00:52
Our resonance, if you exit the left, around the corner on your left side, is the oneness restaurant.
00:00:58
If you exit out the right, around the corner on the right side, is the men's restaurant.
00:01:04
For safety assignments, calling 9-1-1, please raise your hand when I call your name.
00:01:09
Calling 9-1-1, Mary Estelle Douglas, secondary, Mariia Westermann, thank you, CPR, myself, Lamar Bates, secondary, Joan Verbonitz, Dean Ferschke-Sparns, Michael offense, thank you, secondary, DJ Stadtler, thank you.
00:01:24
The AED will call the security desk.
00:01:27
The first aid kit is located on the table against the wall.
00:01:32
Stairwell is located on both sides near the restroom.
00:01:35
Also a fire zone is near the stairwell as well.
00:01:40
Fire extinguishers is near the woman's restroom.
00:01:43
Also, if you go down the hall past the Women's Press Room, there's a tie board room on the right side.
00:01:49
This is the evacuation.
00:01:51
If you need to evacuate, such as a fire, we'll use the spare rail.
00:01:56
We will go to North Light and Capital Square and show the person to your left that's present when we get there to your assembly point.
00:02:03
We'll go to lower level one or the lower level in order to exit the building to go to our assembly point.
00:02:11
If there's an active shooter, please, feed, hide, or fight.
00:02:15
If you see something, say something.
00:02:18
Contact security or call 911.
00:02:21
For those participating virtually, be aware of phishing emails and scams.
00:02:27
Also know your medical emergency and evacuation strategies.
00:02:33
Do we have any questions?
00:02:37
All right, let's have a safe day.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:02:39
Alrighty, thank you.
00:02:41
So for those of you who are new board members, welcome.
00:02:45
And I just want to say, so for me, when I had joined, that was sort of a new thing of what just happened, which was a safety briefing.
00:02:53
And that happens at every VPRA meeting.
00:02:56
Whether you're meeting with the team in their offices or we're having our board meeting, I know VRE does something very similar.
00:03:03
It's really a part of that culture of safety, which is very important to everyone in the transportation industry.
00:03:09
And I think particularly in the rail industry, you all are very focused.
00:03:12
We'll hear more about it.
00:03:13
But September, always a focus on rail safety.
00:03:16
If you see tracks, think trains, anything that we can do to make sure that those who work in the rail industry and those who might be riders or
00:03:26
People walking across tracks are being safe in doing that.
00:03:30
So just wanted to flag in case you were like, is something happening that we just got the safety briefing?
SPEAKER_13
00:03:35
It is part of the traditional culture.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:03:38
So again, I'm very excited that we have new board members here.
00:03:42
I also want to acknowledge our outgoing board members.
00:03:45
First, we have Charlie Payne, who had served from 2022 to 2026.
00:03:51
He has stepped off of the VPRA board, but I want to share that he was actually appointed to the Commonwealth Transportation Board.
00:03:59
So still very much will be involved in watching the rail issues.
00:04:04
both through VPRA and more broadly with the Commonwealth.
00:04:07
So we thank him for his service to the VPRA board.
00:04:11
Also, Benny Zhang, who served from January 2026 to June 2026.
00:04:17
And so we thank Benny for his service.
00:04:19
Even though it was brief, we were very happy to have him on board.
00:04:22
And so with that, I also am happy to announce our new board members.
00:04:27
We have Patricia Doersch or Patty Doersch.
00:04:29
She's known to many of us who's continuing her service on VPRA's board, advancing passenger rail through transportation law, safety, environmental compliance and expertise, supporting complex infrastructure programs and regulatory requirements.
00:04:43
So thank you Patty for continuing service on the board.
00:04:46
Anything else you want to say?
00:04:50
Just pleased to be here.
00:04:52
Terrific.
00:04:53
And Patty represents the Northern Virginia District.
00:04:56
We have Amanda Prater, who is the Director of Policy Advocacy at Gilead Sciences, where she leads healthcare policy, coalition building, and stakeholder partnerships.
00:05:05
And she's representing the Potomac and Rappahannock District.
00:05:09
Would you like to say a few words?
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
00:05:11
Thank you so much.
00:05:12
Happy to be here.
SPEAKER_13
00:05:12
Looking forward to leaning in and learning more.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:05:16
Thank you, Amanda.
00:05:18
And Prescott Sherrod, who is a transportation engineering and management leader and entrepreneur.
00:05:22
He is the CEO and president of, is it PEMCO, Inc., and also started PEMCO Logistics.
00:05:30
So he has over 30 years of industry experience and is here from the Hampton Roads District.
00:05:35
We're very excited to have you.
00:05:37
And if there's anything you'd like to say?
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
00:05:39
Happy to be here, eager to get engaged.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:05:43
Thank you so much.
00:05:44
Well, welcome to our new board members.
00:05:46
And again, thank you to our outgoing board members.
00:05:49
And so with that, we will move into our agenda item four, where we're going to take roll call attendance.
SPEAKER_12
00:05:56
Ms. Bushue.
00:05:59
Ms. Choe.
00:06:01
Mr. Crawford.
00:06:03
Mr. Delandro.
00:06:05
Ms. Doersch.
00:06:06
Mr.
00:06:06
Flowers.
00:06:08
Mr. Jordan.
00:06:12
Ms. Lawrence.
00:06:14
Ms. Mitchell?
SPEAKER_00
00:06:15
Here.
SPEAKER_12
00:06:16
Ms. Pratter?
00:06:17
Here.
00:06:18
Ms. Rhinehart?
00:06:20
Mr. Sherrod?
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:06:21
Here.
SPEAKER_12
00:06:23
Ms. Spears?
00:06:23
Here.
00:06:24
Mr. Watkins?
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:06:25
Here.
SPEAKER_12
00:06:26
Thank you, we have a call.
00:06:28
Thank you.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:06:30
Next up is public comment and we don't have anyone who had signed up for public comment today.
00:06:35
Anyone online?
00:06:39
Alrighty, well we will move ahead and just reminding those of you who might be listening, we are always appreciative of any public comment that folks have to share with the board through our process.
00:06:49
So moving to item number six, we want to approve the meeting minutes from the May 21st meeting and so would request a motion to approve those May 21st meeting minutes.
00:07:03
So all in favor say aye.
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
00:07:08
Aye.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:07:09
Those opposed say nay.
00:07:10
And any abstentions?
00:07:15
Yes, we have Mr. Schrod, who is not here, and I assume also Ms. Satter, who is not.
00:07:22
Great, thank you for that.
00:07:24
Alrighty, so next we're going to talk about our annual governance requirements, and Michael Westermann, who's our general counsel, will lead us through this.
SPEAKER_05
00:07:35
Good morning, everybody.
00:07:36
Michael Westermann, General Counsel.
00:07:40
It's August, so we're doing our annual governance items, elected officers, doing committee assignments, and then we also have one more agenda item, pre-adopting the participation policy, starting with personal first.
00:07:55
Electing officers each year is the board's duty by vote to elect a vice chair, a secretary, and a treasurer.
00:08:01
The first two happen to be board members.
00:08:03
The third one does not.
00:08:05
I have before you a slate of officers as vice chair, Mr. Crawford, as secretary, Ms. Doersch, and then as treasurer, our CFO, Ms. Farmer.
00:08:16
That follows what we've done in the past.
00:08:18
So if there is no discussion or debate, I think we can entertain a motion for the election.
SPEAKER_20
00:08:24
So moved.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:08:25
Second.
00:08:27
All in favor, say aye.
SPEAKER_04
00:08:29
Aye.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:08:30
Those opposed, say nay.
00:08:32
Any abstentions?
00:08:34
All right, the ayes have it.
SPEAKER_05
00:08:37
To the committee.
00:08:40
So we have two PCRVPRA for the new folks.
00:08:43
One is a finance and audit committee.
00:08:45
The other is personnel and compensation.
00:08:46
We had an executive director search committee in the old days.
00:08:50
We got rid of that one.
00:08:51
We don't need it anymore and hope to not need it for a very long time.
00:08:55
So, at least four members on each committee, and the chair of the board and vice chair of the board are automatic members of each committee.
00:09:02
You have a slate of committee assignments before you for finance, Ms. Doherty as the finance committee chair, Mr. Delandro as the vice chair, and then Ms. Spears, Mr. Watkins, Mr. Jordan, and Mr. Sherrod as appointed members, and then of course, chair and board chair as ex officio automatic members.
00:09:20
When we go to personality compensation committee, Ms. Rhinehart is chair, Ms. Lawrence is vice chair, Ms. Bushue, Mr.
00:09:27
Flowers, Ms. Prater has appointed members, and then the next official members, Ms. Zimmerman and Mr. Crawford.
00:09:32
So that is a slate that's before you.
00:09:34
We can do that as one vote.
00:09:35
If there's no discussion or debate, we can entertain a motion for that.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:09:40
So before we vote, I do just want to flag my appreciation for Mr.
00:09:46
Flowers.
00:09:48
We made a slight adjustment.
00:09:49
I had noticed in the board committee assignments that we kind of had some years bunched up and it felt important for our committees to make sure each class, as I call it, was kind of equally represented.
00:10:02
So thank you, Mr.
00:10:03
Flowers, who adjusted to move from finance to personnel compensation.
00:10:07
Case folks are wondering why that shift had happened.
00:10:10
So thank you.
00:10:10
So with that, may I ask all in favor say aye.
00:10:16
Aye.
00:10:17
Those opposed say nay.
00:10:19
Any abstentions?
00:10:22
Ayes have it.
SPEAKER_05
00:10:28
So annually the law requires us to readopt participation policy and all virtual meeting policy.
00:10:36
It's a unique requirement that came under the Freedom of Information Act laws after COVID when people wanted to start meeting remotely.
00:10:46
Two reminders here.
00:10:48
One, we have a written policy and we send that out before we have a board meeting.
00:10:51
So if board members want to participate remotely, please follow the policy.
00:10:54
We have a form to request for remote participation.
00:11:00
The board chair authorizes that.
00:11:02
We do that not to make life large.
00:11:04
We actually make it as easy as possible to follow the requirements.
00:11:09
One more reminder, when you are participating remotely, please keep the camera on.
00:11:15
If you don't, your votes don't count.
00:11:16
You don't count toward a quorum for voting purposes.
00:11:21
So with that, there are literally no substantive changes.
00:11:23
I think the changes to the policy this year was the date at the top.
00:11:27
Everything else remains exact.
00:11:28
Let's have a discussion, questions for today.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:11:34
We'll move.
00:11:35
Second.
00:11:38
All in favor, say aye.
00:11:39
Aye.
00:11:40
Those opposed, say nay.
00:11:42
Any abstentions?
00:11:44
The ayes have it.
00:11:46
Thank you, Mr. Westermann.
00:11:48
All right, now we'll move to what's always an exciting part of the agenda, the executive director's report.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:11:54
Thank you.
00:11:54
I actually thought that governance stuff was pretty sharp.
00:11:57
Thank you, it's good to see everybody.
00:11:59
I had the same issue yesterday when we were re-compressing on BPRA as a whole.
00:12:03
I've got about four hours worth of stuff and I'm giving 35 minutes, so there's a lot that I'm going to go through.
00:12:09
I will say this, it has been an amazing few months since the last board meeting.
00:12:14
Anybody that goes into the city and sees the work on Long Bridge, sees the work on Forth Pratt, sees the work on the bypass, and I go by a lot, but every time you go by, it's, whoa, that client exactly.
00:12:24
So the progress has really been tremendous.
00:12:26
You all have heard me say, many of you have heard me say this before, planning is long, it's tedious, it's so incredibly important.
00:12:32
But when you see dirt clipping, it is incredible.
00:12:35
And the team's going to talk about it more this afternoon.
00:12:38
We've had a lot of challenges over the last three months where you get in in the morning, you're like, wait, they ordered a cable and the cable was faulty and it's going to cost us 10 months?
00:12:47
Hold on a second.
00:12:48
And just the way the team has kind of stuck together and kept things on schedule, found ways to solve problems without making them
00:12:56
Mulhills instead of mountains.
00:12:58
Solving them when they're Mulhills instead of when they're mountains.
00:13:00
It's just been tremendous.
00:13:00
So shout out to the team.
00:13:02
There are so many accolades we should be giving today that we just won't be, but the team has really, really done an incredible job, especially at this last border.
00:13:10
So just quick updates.
00:13:11
We were granted a couple of different grants, $25 million with BUILD grant into the BUILD program.
00:13:17
That will fully fund our Richmond Layer facility.
00:13:19
As folks, I believe, know, right now, many of our southbound frames stop in Staples Hill.
00:13:25
Because south of Staples Mill to the Main Street Station, it's about a six, seven mile run that goes through Acciard, which is very busy.
00:13:33
There's no storage at Main Street.
00:13:35
So to store a train, you've got to then back the train up, shove it back into Staples Mill.
00:13:40
CSX doesn't like that.
00:13:41
It adds congestion.
00:13:42
We are building a layer of facility just south of the Main Street Station that will allow trains to layover, be cleaned, be maintained, give us more options to bring trains all the way down to Main Street.
00:13:53
passenger rail works best when you go city center to city center.
00:13:56
So this is a huge, huge win for the Commonwealth and really for rail service on the East Coast.
00:14:01
This $25 million is the last segment of what's a $70 plus million project, and it's now fully funded.
00:14:07
So we thank the DOT for that.
00:14:09
We were also granted $15.6 million, almost $17 million for the Stanton station.
00:14:15
That's a station that we own.
00:14:16
There's not Virginia State service there, but there is three-day-a-week cardinal service there.
00:14:21
That said, it's right in downtown and it is long overdue for some repair.
00:14:27
Also, it's ADA compliant, but it's not ADA friendly, if I can say that.
00:14:31
The platforms are not in great shape.
00:14:33
If you stand under the canopy, it's great on a sunny day, but on a rainy day, not so much.
00:14:38
So we've been given $16 million to fix all of those issues about that as well.
00:14:42
And then not under our umbrella, but still good news, Chesterfield County got $2.3 million to address a great separation and close crossings in Chesterfield.
00:14:51
So shout out to them.
00:14:52
Anytime we close a crossing or address safety at a crossing, it's a huge, huge win for all of us.
00:14:57
One thing that folks have heard about, it's been around for about 22 years, is the Virginia North Carolina Interstate High Speed Rail Compact.
00:15:04
That was a legislatively created commission that partnered Virginia and North Carolina.
00:15:10
It has been, have you heard of that, Senator?
SPEAKER_19
00:15:13
I think.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:15:16
Senator Watkins was really instrumental in getting that going.
00:15:21
Anyway, that has been a really vigorous effort, and then it's died down for years, and then a vigorous effort died down.
00:15:27
Happy to say that it is once again becoming vigorous.
00:15:30
You see a map here of our current service and the proposed S line.
00:15:34
The dotted line going from just south of Petersburg to Raleigh is the S line that's being worked on now.
00:15:39
It takes you right through La Crosse, Virginia, which is a historic railroad town if you've not been there.
00:15:44
It's got railroad history older than all of us.
00:15:48
But we are reinvigorating the work that's being done here.
00:15:51
We've got a commission meeting happening next month.
00:15:53
So more to come on that, but good news that that is gaining legs.
00:15:57
Here is a snapshot of our 26 organizational goals.
00:16:00
We are almost done with 26.
00:16:01
It's a misnomer because it says fiscal year, the state fiscal year, as you know, goes from July to June, but we actually track the amount of performance year which ends in September.
00:16:12
And you see for the most part, we hit or exceeded our goals.
00:16:14
We have a couple that we've talked about throughout the year that are off track.
00:16:18
As we'll talk about in a second for 27 goals, a lot of what we do is reliant on third parties, whether it's freight railroads or whether it's utility vendors that order their cables from Teemu or whoever it is.
00:16:32
Don't put that in the minutes.
00:16:35
There are things we can't control and we make sure that when we do these goals we number one make them stretch goals and number two make them not slam dunks because it is incumbent on us to work with our partners and get to the common goal.
00:16:48
In a couple cases where we relied on partners and
00:16:51
I'm not pointing the finger at anybody, but we did miss a couple of goals that were a stretch.
00:16:55
But for the most part, we've hit things across the board.
00:16:57
We've got one outstanding, which is the last goal there about enterprise asset management.
00:17:02
You're going to hear a lot about asset management over the coming months.
00:17:06
As you know, we purchased a lot of right away from Norfolk Southern and from CSX.
00:17:10
That maintenance responsibility turns over to us over the coming years.
00:17:14
2030 is really the big year.
00:17:16
And so what we have got to be ready for in 2030 is understanding where our assets are, when they were last maintained, what they're going to cost to keep in a state of good repair.
00:17:25
and so ramping up our whole program for that is going to be a big focus of the next two years and in fact it's our 27 goals will address that but the one thing that we have not yet hit but we're on track for is getting that contract signed by September 30th and we're confident it'll actually be signed probably in the next week or so so that'll close out our 26 goals.
00:17:44
Any questions on 26?
00:17:46
Okay, 27.
00:17:50
You'll see four very similar categories.
00:17:52
We know that we're
00:17:54
We talk a lot about capital projects, we talk a lot about building the bridge and putting in sidings, but unless we're getting people on the train, we're not doing our job.
00:18:02
So our top goal is always ridership and revenue.
00:18:05
We'll talk about it in a minute, but we're thrilled with a reduction of service of 25% because of the Long Bridge work windows that our ridership went down only a couple percent.
00:18:14
I mean, it wasn't down much at all.
00:18:15
We're continuing that path and we're looking for ridership to not go down.
00:18:21
Last year's goal was 1.35 million.
00:18:23
This year's goal is going to be 1.35 million.
00:18:25
As you recall, last year we had six months of full service and six months of the reduced service for Long Bridge.
00:18:31
This year we have 12 months of reduced service for Long Bridge.
00:18:33
So hitting that number is going to be its drag.
00:18:35
The Amtrak team has been a great partner in working on fares and putting sales in place when we need to put sales in place and actually we'll talk later and I think Jeremy this afternoon about the customer service standards that we have in place that really make the service great.
00:18:51
We continue to see when we put trains out in Virginia, people ride them, so we're comfortable with those goals.
00:18:57
Second category is Long Bridge.
00:18:58
Obviously, we don't get any new service until Long Bridge is done.
00:19:02
It's our biggest project, $2.8 billion.
00:19:04
These are stretch goals on both the north package and the south package.
00:19:08
They are ahead of what we would want the schedule to be, but again, they're stretched and we're comfortable that they are good goals for its purpose.
00:19:17
Third category is key milestones for other projects.
00:19:19
You see they're split between four different projects, three on the east side of the Commonwealth and then the New River Valley.
00:19:25
The New River Valley one going from the bottom up would be to get all of the Norfolk Southern work at the New Christiansburg station done by June 1st.
00:19:33
So that way we can start service next summer.
00:19:37
It's interesting when we talk summer.
00:19:38
Some people say summer is Memorial Day.
00:19:40
Some people say, well, September 20th is summer.
00:19:43
I think it's Memorial Day, but we'll talk about that.
00:19:45
But that's a big goal for us.
00:19:46
And we've talked to Norfolk Southern and they're on board for that.
00:19:50
And then working up, we've got a goal for Frank Hunter, Lowton Third Track.
00:19:53
We've got a bypass goal.
00:19:54
And then, of course, the fourth track goal where you see the construction.
00:19:58
And then the last piece that we are putting in place for our 27 goals is under key organizational goals.
00:20:03
These two goals are right aligned with our asset management.
00:20:07
What these are doing is they're developing a map, an interactive map that will tell us what we own.
00:20:14
who owns the stuff by it and what state of good repair it's in, where the assets are, where the switches are, where the signals are, when the tires are replaced, all those kinds of things.
00:20:22
These will be the first steps of getting that information in place so we can quickly mature an asset management program slash platform.
SPEAKER_04
00:20:32
So those are our goals for 27.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:20:34
I'm proud of the fact that these are not goals that I sit in a room and come up with.
00:20:38
These are not goals that the ELT SITS alone comes up with.
00:20:41
We started this process back in March, April.
00:20:43
We sent these out to all the staff.
00:20:45
We said, look, give us goals that are stretch goals.
00:20:48
And we worked with folks.
00:20:49
Some folks said, you know what, we can probably do that faster.
00:20:52
Other places, they said, wait a second, you're being unreasonable.
00:20:54
So we came to a place where everybody in the organization, at least they said,
00:20:59
You don't want to put a goal in place where people are going to say, yep, that's an easy one.
00:21:06
And you also don't want people to say, well, we'll never hit that, so don't even worry about it.
00:21:08
And we think, again, we've found a good balance here.
00:21:12
Any questions on goals or anybody from the yield to you or really anybody that wants to comment?
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:21:19
Good.
SPEAKER_13
00:21:20
Joan, do you want to?
00:21:23
I just want to say how much I appreciate the last goal here, which seems very, I think people under appreciate how important asset management and maintenance is.
00:21:32
And as a beneficiary of well-maintained assets by VPRA, it's really important that this program's in place.
00:21:39
We have a similar effort going on at VRE and we're actually putting KPIs in place to determine, you know, to track the progress of as we
00:21:47
Continue our maintenance or improve the quality of our assets.
00:21:50
How does our service improve?
00:21:52
So we'll be able to do similar calculations based off of BPRA's asset management as well.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:21:58
Thank you.
00:21:59
Yeah.
00:21:59
And in fact, one of the things and I didn't read it, but one of the things is our information has to be able to interact and talk to yours and to Amtrak's and to the freight's because that's critical.
00:22:07
It's kind of like payroll.
00:22:08
You don't really think about it, but when it's not done right, you know about it.
00:22:11
You know about it quickly.
00:22:12
And this is important.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:22:14
I was going to also say I appreciated that work.
00:22:18
I know there's conversations that we've been having with some of our partners as well between DRPT and VPRA and VRE and localities around development opportunities around some of our rail stations.
00:22:30
And so I think the issue of ownership is more complicated than folks might imagine.
00:22:35
But being able to really have clarity around that data is useful.
00:22:38
I do have a question for you, Mr. Stadtler.
00:22:41
On the advanced key milestones for Long Bridge,
00:22:44
Could you give a little more flavor about what substantial completion means?
00:22:50
Like how you all interpret that?
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:22:52
Sure.
00:22:52
So substantial completion, it's actually, it's a term of art.
00:22:54
It means it's done and it's all set.
00:22:56
Now, if they're punch list items, like we have to go back and make a small change here, but that's it's done.
00:23:00
We've checked it off and it's complete.
00:23:02
you know a lot of times you've like both have substantial completion of the bridge in 2030 and it'll be operational and ready to go but we'll probably be doing touch-up items into 2031 it just it basically means it's done but you can't get caught on the well you didn't repaint that wall there I mean it's so it's that like that do that all right if Dallas is not in his head I feel like I'm all right any other questions on 27 goals
00:23:28
Awesome.
00:23:29
Thank you.
00:23:29
Passenger service updates.
00:23:30
I'm going to go through this very quickly.
00:23:31
This continues to be consistent news, which is good.
00:23:35
Our ridership, as I mentioned earlier, was ahead of the previous year through about January, well through December, and then in January when we reduced service, it went below.
00:23:45
But as you see, in June, we were very close to where we were the June before.
00:23:49
So over the year, we were down less than 1%, which with a 25% service reduction for half of the year is a huge, huge win.
00:23:57
Looking at 27 we've got our first month July of 27 and we were about 2% below July of last year and this is the trend that we've got to follow the previous year.
00:24:09
Here is the ridership breakout segment by segment.
00:24:12
You see we're above in Roanoke, we're above in Newport News.
00:24:14
The place where we're down is Norfolk because we went from three trains down to two.
00:24:19
And then also what you don't see here that's part of it is we used to have the Richmond service that started in Richmond and that service went away.
00:24:25
We still have trains obviously that go to Richmond because everything from Norfolk, everything from Newport News stops in Richmond and Ashland, Fredericksburg, et cetera.
00:24:32
But the places where we've not made service changes, we continue to see ridership growth, which really
00:24:38
It vindicates us for what we're doing.
00:24:41
It gets us excited or even more excited for 2030, where we can go from these six trains up to eventually 13.
SPEAKER_20
00:24:48
DJ, I'm just going to ask a question now.
00:24:49
I see that the projected revenue per rider in July is going to be up for next year, but due to the reduced service in certain areas, is that going to create a problem with our ridership funding or
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:25:04
No, no.
00:25:05
First of all, we knew it was coming, so we planned for it ahead of time.
00:25:09
When we talk about the budget, you'll see it, our revenue is down, but also our expenses are down.
00:25:13
So yes, we're not pulling as much ticket revenue, but we're also spending less because we're not running those trains.
00:25:19
The buses cost us, obviously, but it works out okay.
00:25:22
So we still are okay.
00:25:24
It doesn't give us a budget problem.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:25:26
Okay.
00:25:26
Maybe just to flag if I will.
00:25:28
So the SFY is the state fiscal year, which started July 1st.
00:25:32
So we are
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:25:33
And as I mentioned earlier, we work closely with the Amtrak fare revenue team because we don't want to charge a ton of money and highlight revenue, but we also want to give away for free.
00:25:50
So we try to find that sweet spot where we maximize revenue ridership.
00:25:54
Some folks may recall a couple of years ago, we had some problems with that, where our ridership was fine, but our revenue was way down.
00:26:01
We've done a good job, I think, of working with Amtrak to balance that.
00:26:07
So here's Washington and Roanoke and I'll just flip through this quickly.
00:26:10
Washington Newport News, pretty much the same good news story.
00:26:13
I will point out that our customer on-time performance for the last few months especially has not been great.
00:26:19
64% is not a number that we strive for.
00:26:23
We like to be above 80% routinely.
00:26:26
Jeremy's going to talk about this this afternoon.
00:26:28
The good news is that a lot of our late trains are not
00:26:31
Really late, they're just missing it by a little bit, but still, 64% is not good.
00:26:37
Amtrak gets that, Beery gets that, the Freights get that, and we're working together with all of them to say, okay, why are these trains not working as well as we expected them to, and what are we doing to make sure that we approve that?
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
00:26:49
DJ, just on that, since you brought it up, because I noticed that you're on time performance, and it's not just this line, it's a bunch of them, right?
00:26:54
It's possible.
00:26:55
And it's not due to excess ridership.
00:26:58
Right.
00:27:00
Is it due to factors outside of our control, weather, freight?
00:27:06
I mean, is it solvable?
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:27:08
I would argue that weather is outside of our control.
00:27:11
That's correct.
00:27:12
But we know over the summer we're going to have slow orders because of heat.
00:27:16
And what we do is we adjust the schedules so folks know they're going to not be on time.
00:27:20
There has been a lot of freight train interference.
00:27:22
We have had some weather issues where there have been trees on tracks and those kinds of things.
00:27:27
You say it's not because of excess ridership, but surprisingly, there has been an uptick in dwell time where it takes longer to board and get folks off the train, get folks off the train and then report the train.
00:27:38
And that's something that people don't really pay attention to.
00:27:40
But if you're on a train that's got 10 stops and each stop, it takes you an extra minute to get folks off the train with their luggage or get on the train.
00:27:47
That's a 10 minute delay.
00:27:48
And all of a sudden you're on a late train.
00:27:50
So that's something that the Amtrak crews pay close attention to.
00:27:54
It's something that we watch as well.
00:27:55
But there has been an uptick in that.
00:27:56
So it's a variety of different things.
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
00:27:58
Right, and I think Jeremy will cover this in his very, very data dense slides.
00:28:03
One of the metrics, right, that we judge Amtrak on, it's one of their own metrics.
00:28:10
It's like, are you helping people get on and off the train?
00:28:12
Coming on today, I mean, those stairs, they couldn't be steeper and you're carrying a bag that's much bigger than hand load.
00:28:18
It's right.
00:28:18
So part of that is we want to help people get on and off the train.
00:28:22
Which increases dwell time, right?
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:28:24
Right, and that's one of the things, and I forward it a little bit to customer service standards, that's one of the things that we track on customer service standards because we've all seen it.
00:28:31
Some conductors are like, hey, let me help you with that, and they've really tried moving along and they're like, go ahead, get on board.
00:28:36
And we've seen, as you can see from these scores, really a shift from the, all right, get on board, to the let me help you because they're watching it now as well.
00:28:44
But it's just like anything
00:28:47
If you watch it, it'll get better.
00:28:49
As soon as you stop watching it, you should start watching it.
Darien Flowers
Member, Board of Directors
00:28:53
DJ, to Patty's point though, 12 times.
00:28:56
Well, this eventually though be solved as we get our station improvements, right?
00:29:00
Because if we don't, a lot of our station improvements now will be, the forms will be almost not grade, but like vehicle height, right?
00:29:08
So that you can kind of walk onto the carriage, right?
00:29:13
So that those dwell times, if you have luggage, things like that, that'll be solved for.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:29:17
It's easy for me to say yes to that because in some cases it's very true, but in some cases you can't.
00:29:23
So level boarding, you're talking about level boarding and we've got level boarding now.
00:29:26
at Newport News.
00:29:27
We've got level boarding at Roanoke.
00:29:29
We'll have level boarding at the New River Valley Station.
00:29:31
You're absolutely correct.
00:29:31
Just walking off is much easier, whether you've got luggage, strollers, whatever, much easier.
00:29:36
There are some stations where the platform is on the main line.
00:29:40
So the track that we stop on and people get off the train is also used by freight trains.
00:29:44
And the window or the envelope that the freight train uses when it goes won't allow for high level platforms because their train car conflicts with the platform.
00:29:53
So you can't have level boarding everywhere.
00:29:57
I guess in a perfect world, every single station could have a sidetrack or a pocket track where it pulls off of the main, lets people off, then gets back on the main.
00:30:04
But that's not contemplated for everywhere.
00:30:06
So we will have this issue for the foreseeable future in place.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
00:30:12
Go ahead, Mike.
00:30:12
But there are some projects like at Alexandria Station where they're not building high level platforms, but they're going to be an improved boarding experience.
00:30:23
I think new stations at Crystal City and Long Front
00:30:26
I think will help there as well.
00:30:28
So it might not be high level, but if anyone might be playing without G2, it's quite a steep climb.
Darien Flowers
Member, Board of Directors
00:30:35
Yeah, it's like even from the end of the stair from this train, and then it's a pretty big gap to get down.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
00:30:41
So when there are opportunities to your point, even if it's not the high level, to improve it even by a few inches, we collectively, whether it be
00:30:50
VRE doing the work, or VPR doing the work, or CSX or something are taking that opportunity.
00:30:55
Any within the DJ setting, new stations or anything.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:30:59
Yeah, no, Mike's exactly right.
00:31:00
So you, I'm sorry, you want the, in a perfect world, you want level boarding.
00:31:04
The next world, which lets freight go by as well, you want eight inches over rail.
00:31:08
If you go to Alexandria, it's four inches below rail.
00:31:11
So that, you know, that extra 12 inches adds a lot of time as people let go.
00:31:14
Do I have the yellow step stool there?
00:31:16
So that kind of stuff will be improved with our station program.
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
00:31:19
We're going with our four tracks and two are ours and two are others, right?
00:31:23
Can we get level boarding on our two?
00:31:28
Maybe someday?
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:31:29
Part of the agreement we have is it requires interoperability.
00:31:32
So if there's an appearance on one track, we've got to be able to have the freight's direction.
00:31:36
There are places, though, where we've got projects.
00:31:38
We talked about this at the Crystal City Station, where you'll have half a platform that's high level and half that's not, where you can get a gauntlet track that it moves it over.
00:31:48
There are ways to get around this, but it's not a problem that's going to be solved when Long Bridge is done.
00:31:53
OK. We sit here and say, oh, when Long Bridge is done, we can do this.
00:31:55
This isn't something.
00:31:57
This one's not on us, really.
00:31:58
Yeah, okay.
00:31:59
Let me just go back.
00:32:01
This chart we talked about, we continue to see in Virginia compared to other states that per train ridership, we are pretty consistently above other states, which continues to be a good news story for us.
00:32:14
Customer service standards, I just mentioned this a little bit, but here's the snapshot.
00:32:18
You see when we first started in 2024, you've got a lot of red with the lines in it.
00:32:22
And now after the second quarter, second calendar quarter of 2026, you only have a couple of things that we're watching.
00:32:29
Just speaks to the Amtrak partnership and the good work that's being done by our team and by the crews.
00:32:36
Cost recovery, this 96 is a huge anomaly, don't high five about that.
00:32:43
This year, every year we allocate part of our administrative cost to capital, and last year our capital spending was just about where we expected it to be, a little bit lower, but this year the capital spending has really ramped up because of all the construction that you see.
00:32:58
So the rate for allocation that we used last year on capital allocation is not appropriate this year.
00:33:04
We reset that every single year, and so when that gets reset, that will drop down probably
00:33:09
In the low 70s, maybe around 70s.
00:33:12
This is what the numbers say now.
00:33:15
You'll see this is through May.
00:33:16
We have financial data that is later because obviously, the fiscal year ended in June, but our auditors are working on that now.
00:33:22
We won't have final reports until probably sometime late next month or middle next month.
00:33:29
We still are thrilled with the number we have, even if it's not 96, it's still a big story.
00:33:36
and then here's our operations budget.
00:33:38
This is a great place to see it.
00:33:40
So our budget expectations for our revenue, we were slightly below where we thought we would be.
00:33:47
So we thought we'd get 87, $88 million in revenue and we ended up getting 85.
00:33:52
So we were off by 4 million, but our expenses were off by much less than that.
00:33:56
So it turns out that we turn out okay from a budget point of view and then pretty much straightforward.
00:34:02
That's all good news and as expected.
00:34:06
And here's the same information route by route.
00:34:08
It's pretty consistent.
00:34:10
Nothing revolutionary there.
00:34:13
Any questions on the passenger ridership before I turn it to Mike for some very quick Capital Project updates?
00:34:22
Mike?
00:34:23
Mike's going to go through this very quickly because this afternoon we have a more in-depth project updates, but I want to just, we try to make sure that every month obviously, as you know, when we have a board meeting, we present the executive directors for here, but when there's no board meeting,
00:34:38
We like to put the same format out.
00:34:40
We send it all to you.
00:34:41
We post it on the website.
00:34:42
So we like to keep it consistent.
00:34:44
There's a lot of information that we'll go over in more detail.
00:34:46
It is amazing to me, and it's really something that we take pride in.
00:34:51
Every time we publish the executive directorship report without fail, the next day we get a comment from somebody somewhere across the country, not even the Commonwealth, who reads it and says, hey, I saw on page 22.
00:35:01
Is this new?
00:35:02
I mean, people are really paying attention, which is exciting.
00:35:04
For a long time, people
00:35:05
didn't pay attention to passenger rail, and they're paying attention not only to us, but as we talked about earlier, folks all across the country, we need to continue to make sure that when they talk about Virginia and passenger rail, that we're with glowing headlines and not some of the other end line.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
00:35:19
So Mike, capital project updates.
00:35:22
Sure.
00:35:22
I think you said we'll go quickly.
00:35:26
We wanted to pause that, though.
00:35:28
It wasn't on the phone.
00:35:31
And at the
00:35:32
July board meeting, I believe it was, Katie.
00:35:36
VRE announced, so in that month you had both the $25 million grant from U.S.
00:35:40
DOT and you announced your contractor, which is a familiar name to some of us, Skanska.
00:35:46
Skanska is our contractor for Long Bridge North.
00:35:49
Long Bridge North ends at Control Point L.E., Long Farm.
00:35:53
So there'll be the same contractor that will be building
00:35:56
L'Anfant, the Myler Cell from the end of the Long Bridge project up to Union Station and building Long Bridge North.
00:36:03
So that was just a part of the procurement process.
00:36:07
That was not predetermined.
00:36:08
I just want to be very clear about that.
00:36:09
They had their procurement process just like we did, Skanska had the best.
00:36:14
And Katie, as we talked about, happy to chime in for a minute there.
SPEAKER_13
00:36:18
Yeah, no, you said it.
00:36:20
It's a happy circumstance that we have the same contractor.
00:36:25
It's not the same team that's building it.
00:36:26
So we're not worried about resources.
00:36:29
But certainly from a coordination standpoint, that will make it easiest.
00:36:32
We do have a year's worth of preconstruction services that are now underway with Skanska.
00:36:38
And there may be some early construction packages and early procurement that happens within that year.
00:36:44
So we're really thrilled with the progress on this project.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
00:36:46
And thank you for inviting us to participate.
00:36:48
Jeff Pelletier, who's in the corner of the room and will speak later, was a participant in a lot of these deliberations with regard to the reselection of a contract.
00:36:59
That will, the project there will again will be the last mile of ADU station, but also create that island platform that you can serve from two edges.
00:37:08
Right now, a lot of the fine platform is only served from one edge, so you can't have two trains there at the same time.
00:37:15
But a feature of a lot of projects coming there in Crystal City are you can have an island platform, which means train control from both sides.
00:37:22
So that's a key aspect of adding capacity and equal, so trains won't pick you up.
00:37:28
I'm going to move very quickly through the next few because we have not only people presenting, but we have a video coming up.
00:37:36
Long Bridge, just want to point out Retaining Well Hill, you've already heard of once it was in our goals, that is just south of Maryland Avenue and goes to Main Avenue.
00:37:45
Retaining Wells are one of those costs of the projects that people don't think about, but are very expensive.
00:37:50
So they're very important as well for the projects.
00:37:54
and anyone who's been up there, you know, there has been traffic shifts with regard to Main Avenue.
00:37:59
And if you're giving us apologies for that and we're working through it, but I think so far things are going well.
00:38:06
Long Bridge South, DJ and I had the opportunity to go out there last month and at the northern shore of Buttman B, that's the northern shore of Potomac, they're putting the support piers for the future bridge into the ground.
00:38:24
As you might expect, when you're only about 50 feet off Potomac River, people that are working with crews that have their materials out are wading in water.
00:38:36
There's a couple feet of water.
00:38:38
So you can't look at the arc, which is the very bright point of the
00:38:46
the sheet metal workers and others who are doing their work because it's that bright but so they're taking protective measures to make sure everything's fine there but it's it's interesting to see the work that's happening to see the actual bridge being built again just on the north side of 25, 50 feet from Potomac Bridge.
00:39:05
We have plans to take the board out for a tour in November so you'll see about this project.
00:39:11
Alexandra Fortrack, DJ mentioned earlier a lot of work going on there and that's from Alexandra South and Alexandra Station up to the Potomac River.
00:39:21
in Burlington.
00:39:23
A lot of activities are happening there.
00:39:26
You might not be able to see it.
00:39:27
The work you will see in the area is the next slide.
00:39:31
Alexandria Station in King Commonwealth, which is BPA funded for the most part.
00:39:35
Well, all of King Commonwealth is funded.
00:39:36
VRE is leading, coordinating very closely.
00:39:39
And if you happen to be out there, stop and take a look when you were on the
00:39:46
Northside, Westside of King Street.
00:39:48
You will see the where they're starting to build the walls and you'll see the difference of going from 40 some feet to 80 some feet of the width underneath King Street.
00:39:57
I had to stop and do a double take because I get off there every day.
00:40:00
I first saw it a couple weeks ago.
00:40:02
How much wider the berth will be underneath King Street especially.
00:40:07
That would be a great improvement for the for the city of Alexandria because with modern technology we would jump over the
00:40:15
the King Street, much more broad broad pattern.
00:40:21
The Frank Hurley Springfield Bypass, again, we're going to talk about this in a little bit, including the utility relocations, even having good conversations with fiber optics and Ken Morgan, who runs a gas pipeline up to a national airport.
00:40:36
Prenkody Lord and Vertrac in that same area.
00:40:38
Similarly, we are working with utilities there, but also the big news here is that CSX did put out their procurement, their bid for their work leading the construction of this on August 7th.
00:40:51
Those bids are due back in mid-October for not just Prenkody Lord, but also Newington Road.
00:40:58
For those in that area, we're building a new bridge over Newington Road and it's going to be widened to allow for one lane of traffic in each direction.
00:41:04
Right now it's just one lane total.
00:41:08
So work that is happening there includes railroads interlocking.
00:41:11
If you do take the train, you see a lot of signal work going on there.
00:41:14
They're starting to wrap that up.
00:41:18
Other capital projects, I mentioned Newington Road, and we'll hear more about Fairfax County Utilities related today during the budget announcement.
00:41:25
As a reminder, Fairfax, the utilities that need to be moved, they have agreements with the freight railroads.
00:41:31
They have to move at their own cost, but we're helping them out by fronting the money up front and
00:41:37
and moving the utilities for them and they will pay us back over the lifetime of the project for Fairfax County and Stafford County.
00:41:43
And this one, this mentions Fairfax County.
00:41:47
And that procurement was released and we expect soon to issue that utility relocation for Fairfax County and that Franconia area soon.
00:41:59
Sidings projects.
00:42:02
These are all in, except for Siding A, the rest of them are all in early stages of design.
00:42:08
Siding A is nearing 100% design, and that's procurement we plan to put out next spring.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:42:13
Actually, we've updated each of these, and I don't know if you saw it last month, but on the right-hand side, you see the existing rail and where we're adding the siding.
00:42:20
So this is when we first did Transfer Rail in Virginia agreement with CSX.
00:42:26
These are strategically placed
00:42:28
additions to infrastructure where there are bottlenecks that will make it operationally easier to operate.
00:42:34
Also, spoiler alert, if you look, many of them are right next to a big body of water, like just north of there's the Occoquan River.
00:42:41
Eventually, when we get to phase three and four, we'll be building a big bridge over the Occoquan River as well.
00:42:45
So having this third track there will allow us to connect for a nonstop third track all the way down.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
00:42:51
Big bodies of water are often the no-retain walls because the water
00:42:56
that sometimes you have to drill more retaining walls the closer you get to water.
00:43:00
Moving south, moving further on, IED, again, that's a project that we are in 60% design, so I should stop and note that these projects are in 30-60% design.
00:43:14
By the time we get to next year's budget, which starts in, well it will come to you in January, our staff are starting to work on it.
00:43:20
If not now, we'll have better cost estimates.
00:43:25
So we might come back to you with some updated cost estimates in next year's budget, which again is just in a few months.
00:43:33
Again, moving further south, Siding E, which is near the Brooke Station, I often think of, we're Siding D, in the Woodbridge Station.
00:43:41
Siding E is near the Brooke Station, Siding F is near Spelzeville Station, Siding A is near Leland Station, for those who might be reading those, know those stations.
00:43:50
So, 5-3, because Siding E is near the, again, also in the 30% design, we might have updated cost estimates coming to you.
00:43:57
If not, maybe even before January, we might have some updates for you in November.
00:44:03
and Givlin South, which is further along since we started the project earlier, since it's a phase one project has to be.
00:44:15
And overpass is a, so a lot of you noticing a lot of these projects could be broken up into segments.
00:44:21
That is overpass that CSX is not building that we are building in coordination.
00:44:26
Well, we got permission from VDOT to do it.
00:44:29
We do have a contract with that.
00:44:30
Again, I mentioned the utilities locations.
00:44:34
and Siding F again.
00:44:35
That's a very important siding because that, I consider that the, so if you need a 500, you have a starting line, you need to have the cars lined up before they go.
00:44:45
And you have, because there you have the VRE trains lined up, because that is where the VRE trains start, just before the sponsoring station there.
00:44:54
Crossroads Yard is literally adjacent to the sponsoring station.
00:45:01
Signing C is one we moved, we worked with CSX to move and some Hanover County, because we didn't want to build without a new bridge.
00:45:10
And I'm going to skip over some of these.
00:45:12
One I want to point out was original air facility, which DJ mentioned earlier, we got to receive that grant.
00:45:17
And I believe there will be a budget adjustment for that coming up soon.
00:45:22
Stanton, if you want to point that out, we did receive money for that as well to rebuild
00:45:29
Platform and the canopy which are if anyone's been out there in the state of This repair should know there's while there's limited service there.
00:45:38
We consider this a generational investment Amtrak does have a quarter ID Application and to move that to seven day a week service meaning that being Cardinal service So right now there's only trains Three days a week east and three days a week west, but there's a possibility that could be seven day a week service
00:45:59
Richmond to Raleigh.
00:46:00
DJ, when you mentioned the compact, one thing that we're currently doing with North Fine is going through conceptual design for Richmond to Raleigh.
00:46:10
That will give us cost estimates for things such as the bridge that has independent utility that could help places like Henson Rose.
00:46:19
Again, in New York Valley, we're gonna get into this, but we are getting to the point where we're only about a year away.
00:46:26
Maybe a little more to opening up the New River Valley Station, opening up service there.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:46:31
Maybe a little less.
00:46:33
Maybe a little less than a year away.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
00:46:35
Yes, DJ, this is something to beat the mic.
00:46:39
We're going to have a video discussion later.
00:46:43
Western Rail Project updates, Milksville to Calverton is a double-track project that will help with service to and from Roanoke and also all the way down to New Orleans.
00:46:50
Roanoke Yard is necessary to get the trains quickly from Roanoke through the yard to New York.
00:46:58
And with that, I believe we have right-of-way acquisition updates in two different locations.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:47:03
Yeah, we'll talk about right-of-way later, but right-of-way just continues to be good news for making great progress.
00:47:07
As folks know, a couple of years ago, this was a big, big challenge for us, but we have worked with CSX, we've worked with our incredible right-of-way team, and we're on a good path forward here.
00:47:17
All right, any questions on the capital projects?
SPEAKER_21
00:47:20
Yes.
00:47:22
When we finish, everything is aimed for a period of time
00:47:27
About 2030.
00:47:30
We'll do everything to be complete.
00:47:32
Are we putting together what we planned at 2030?
00:47:38
Because, you know, we've got a lot of work to do south of Richmond to get to the North Carolina area.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:47:47
Yeah, so there are two
00:47:49
things that are being put together for after 2030.
00:47:51
The first is what trains are coming back and when, what trains are being added and when, because you're not just going to go and say, oh, we've got eight new trains starting today, let's go.
00:48:01
So we're working on those schedules with Amtrak and with Viri, but we're also working on, okay, it's now 2026.
00:48:09
If we're going to be doing construction at the Maddox River Bridge or Petersburg, we've got the Ettrick Station that we're doing work on,
00:48:16
Occoquan River Bridge.
00:48:17
If we're going to be doing construction on those things as the construction on Long Bridge and the fourth track winds down, we've got to start design sometime for the next 12 months.
00:48:28
Yes, we're beginning those planning now.
00:48:30
We've talked to the Secretary's office about here are the priorities, here are the dollar amounts.
00:48:34
Some of them are really, really big dollars, but here are some small things that we can do quickly.
00:48:38
Yes, you'll see a lot more of that conversation
00:48:41
Probably over the next nine months, we'll be working on what comes next, both on the train service and the construction side project.
SPEAKER_21
00:48:49
Well, I mean, the whole purpose of the compact was to fund another financial avenue, if you would.
00:48:56
And so we've got to start with the congressional leadership that would be involved in that, to wind them up, if you would, because
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:49:10
On both sides of the border, yeah.
00:49:12
Well actually on three sides, so south of us in North Carolina and also north in DC because a lot of what the S line benefits is the long distance transit and track.
00:49:20
And so what happened was, and Mike, step in and correct me when I'm wrong here, but in February the FRA
00:49:26
finally obligated, not the right word, but finally obligated the $58 million grant to North Carolina to do the design work.
00:49:32
And they were very clear, North Carolina, you're the lead on this.
00:49:35
You've got 12 months.
00:49:36
You need to get the design work done.
00:49:38
So we know whether this is a $6 billion problem or a $12 billion problem and how we can stair step in and get things done more efficiently.
00:49:46
So their deadline, our deadline working with them is February of next year.
00:49:50
We'll know a lot more then about what kind of money we're looking for.
00:49:53
Mike, that's correct.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:49:55
And if I may as well, with the North Carolina work, they have been working very closely with FRA and their delegation as well.
00:50:06
I think they're feeling pretty good about the relationship that they have with the federal government.
00:50:10
They also received a very significant FED state partnership grant that was announced the same time.
00:50:18
Too many grants.
00:50:19
I shouldn't say that.
SPEAKER_09
00:50:20
No, Congress.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
00:50:23
But they also received a significant grant for some of their rail work.
00:50:28
Part of what we've been talking about with the Virginia North Carolina Compact, which will include members of our House and Senate as well as members of theirs, North Carolina does not have a dedicated sort of trust fund the way we do in Virginia.
00:50:43
And they're very interested in trying to get their legislators on board, if you will, with that.
00:50:48
But I think we've been thinking a lot about
00:50:51
both you know what happens in that short term once 2030 is here just to be able to support the operations but what comes more long term and so I think that's feeding into the statewide rail plan that DRPT is leading the effort with VPRA and VRE and others that statewide rail plan we did a little briefing on that in the last meeting we're looking to have that it slipped a little bit getting some data that we needed which is another story but it's largely on track
00:51:19
that we should have a version of that in January or February.
00:51:22
And that will really be looking at that 20 year horizon.
00:51:26
And we're planning to brief the Commonwealth Transportation Board in December on that we can come back to obviously this board as well and keep you all informed of what that long term picture is looking like as we look at phases three and four.
00:51:39
of Transforming Rail in Virginia and some of these.
00:51:42
I think the other thing we are trying to think about with that, we have an uncertain federal landscape at the moment.
00:51:50
So both, how do we ensure that our federal delegation knows how important rail is to Virginia?
00:51:56
So we welcome everyone from the board helping to educate Congress on that.
00:52:00
But I think we also wanna look to see how we can progress things in Virginia with the tools that we have as well.
SPEAKER_21
00:52:07
But yes, absolutely, we need the preference from the General Assembly.
SPEAKER_11
00:52:20
There was also a development on the acquisition side.
00:52:24
Virginia was able to acquire the Virginia section from CSX.
00:52:28
North Carolina was not able to acquire it directly from CSX.
00:52:32
Amtrak, though, has stepped in and we have agreed to acquire it on their behalf.
00:52:37
And so our board approved that at our last meeting.
00:52:42
There are still some
00:52:44
There's still some due diligence work that needs to conclude.
00:52:49
I think we are tentatively scheduled to close on that property with CSX in mid-December.
00:52:55
So if all goes well with the due diligence process.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:53:03
Grant update, the Chair mentioned all of the grant programs that are out there.
00:53:06
We have been fortunate to get a number of grants here to snap out of those.
00:53:11
The big changes are we had the Feds State Partnership grant up on the upper left.
00:53:16
We had asked for money for the Occoquan Third River, Occoquan River Third Track design.
00:53:21
We were not selected for that, but we also have that in the Crissy.
00:53:25
Application Round, so hopefully we'll be there.
00:53:28
And then Richmond Layer Facility, we had to ask for that under FESTA partnership, but we were given $25 million under build, so that really goes away.
00:53:36
The next grant announcements will be Chrissy, and hopefully you see the four that we've got in there.
00:53:41
Stan can come out because we got that already and ask for Richmond Layer Facility.
00:53:46
So that's the grants.
00:53:47
Laura, can you go over revenue investment for us, please?
Laura Farmer
Chief Financial Officer
00:53:52
Slide for vibrancy, rolling total analysis,
00:53:55
from the Rail Fund.
00:53:56
I'm pleased to say we didn't meet the estimates for fiscal year 2026.
00:54:00
That will be displayed in future updates to the board as we close out the financials from that year.
00:54:06
And so this reflects the fiscal year in July and no reason to be concerned yet.
00:54:11
So we're pretty pleased with the projection.
00:54:16
In terms of our rolling investments,
00:54:19
To deliver all of these projects, the revenue stream we've been provided has been collecting over time to help sustain this enormous company program that VPRA is administering.
00:54:29
And so over the year to date, $765 million average invested balance over that period of time, we invested in both the local government investment pool, or LGIP, as well as a managed portfolio.
00:54:45
And in July, we earned $2.4 million.
00:54:51
This slide just provides the base versus market value and the gain attributable for July of 1.6%.
00:55:02
And then the next slide is just the liquidity and the view of our current investments.
00:55:10
As they reach their final maturity date, we have a lot coming offline in the portfolio in the current year.
00:55:16
and we've asked the advisors as they come home offline to reinvest them for the end of 2028.
00:55:23
Our strategy is to work down our LGIP balance and then move into what's in the portfolio of the sustainable future and the capital program delivery.
00:55:35
I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have.
00:55:40
This slide just talks about the returns against the benchmark for both investment
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:55:47
As a reminder, our goal is not portfolio growth, it's capital protection and the team does a fantastic job of investing and making sure that we have the money we need when we need it to get these projects.
00:56:04
Any questions for Laura?
Darien Flowers
Member, Board of Directors
00:56:06
You said that we want to reduce our LGIP assets.
00:56:13
Forgive me if I misunderstood you.
00:56:14
Is that then to move them into cash or like to treasuries so that they're liquid, or is it to move it into the other parts of the existing asset classes?
Laura Farmer
Chief Financial Officer
00:56:24
Because the National Program is really going like any of us for the last three months alone, we spend about $18 million a week on projects and the agency operations.
00:56:34
And so what I was saying is our strategy is just to bleed that balance down, not prolong the whole portfolio until we need it for the capital.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
00:56:46
Okay.
00:56:47
Administrative updates.
00:56:48
We have been here five years and we thought it was a good time to do an employee engagement survey.
00:56:54
One of the things that we talk about continuously is culture and making sure that we understand or have our thumbs on the pulse of the culture, so to speak.
00:57:03
That's so cliche.
00:57:04
Sorry about that.
00:57:05
We did an employee engagement survey.
00:57:07
We opened it in May.
00:57:08
It was open for a couple of weeks.
00:57:09
Thrilled to say that we had 80% participation.
00:57:11
So 53 of 66 folks.
00:57:13
83% of the responses were favorable.
00:57:17
We've got a lot of detail about this and we can answer questions that you have.
00:57:21
Here are some of the things we got highest scores on.
00:57:25
Integrity was big, which is something about the time.
00:57:27
I enjoy working with people on my team, and I think that included me, so I think we're good about that.
00:57:32
Vision, mission, and goals are important to me personally.
00:57:35
I mean, these are all good things.
00:57:37
On the right-hand side, you see how our scores compare to the global scores, public administration scores, and transportation scores, and you see we were higher for the most part than most of our peers that we were looking at.
00:57:49
That said, we have opportunities for improvement.
00:57:52
Here are our lower scores.
00:57:54
People talk about the workload.
00:57:55
We've got a lot going on as we see me putting eight hours worth of stuff into 35 minutes.
00:58:01
So there are places where we can make improvements.
00:58:03
We've already started talking to managers about scores, and we've got an all-staff meeting in September where we're going to talk about, here's what we heard.
00:58:12
Can you validate this?
00:58:13
Are we hearing the right things?
00:58:14
And here are the steps we're taking to address some of the concerns.
00:58:19
But overall, good news.
00:58:21
I think we have been consistent over the five and a half years of working very hard to make sure that VPRA is a place where people are challenged and a place where people understand that there's a heavy workload, but there's also a good, good reward.
00:58:36
We're doing something that really makes a difference.
00:58:37
And so we were pleased with these results.
00:58:40
More information to come.
00:58:43
So here are the next steps.
00:58:44
We talked about that as well.
00:58:45
Administrative budget, pretty straightforward, we're in good shape.
00:58:48
We spent a little bit more on payroll and benefits than we expected, but we were able to offset that because we spent less on consultants.
00:58:55
This was a big shift this year.
00:58:58
We talked about it at our December all staff meeting that we now have experts in the areas we need experts, so we're going to rely less on consultants and more on ourselves.
00:59:07
And you see that we, again, made that shift, surplus on consultants, but a little more spending on personnel.
00:59:14
No budget adjustments to report in July.
00:59:16
Here are contracting updates.
00:59:18
Every month, we update you on any contracts between $250,000 and $5 million.
00:59:23
Pretty straightforward.
00:59:24
This is work on the sewer location, relocation that Mike talked about, some design work at ETRIC.
00:59:29
We had to renew what we chose to renew our IT services that does our IT security, does our IT service backbones work, and then every year we've got insurance, so that was $1.2 million.
00:59:42
Active Procurements that are ongoing now, you see these here, pretty straightforward.
00:59:47
The one I just want to highlight is tree felling.
00:59:49
So part of what we do in all of our projects, and you've got to bring trees down, it'll surprise I don't think anybody that there are certain times of years that things happen in trees that we shouldn't be interrupting.
00:59:59
That's all I'm going to say.
01:00:02
Some of these projects, we had construction plans that overlapped
01:00:06
with those times of year so we were proactive and went out and we're getting ourselves our own tree felling so we can go to project site and say look we don't have a contractor yet for this the procurement's still ongoing but we've got a group that's going to go out and cut the trees that we know need to go down so that way time of year restrictions aren't going to be a problem.
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
01:00:23
So these are like nesting birds or something?
01:00:27
Bats.
01:00:27
Bats.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
01:00:28
They are creatures of many kinds who are quite amorous during certain times of the year.
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
01:00:32
But so if we take it in house, we can cut?
01:00:35
No.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
01:00:38
It would be great.
01:00:39
How do I make that work, Mr. Westermann?
01:00:42
A schedule such that CSX's procurement is going to, and I'm making these dates up, CSX's procurement is going to be finalized in September.
01:00:50
They're going to choose a contractor by the third week of September, and that contractor will get a notice to proceed the middle of October.
01:00:56
Unfortunately, our time of year restriction starts October 1st, so they would show up and say, well, we can't cut any trees until January.
01:01:03
What we're doing is we're signing our own contract so we can get folks out before October 1st, fell the trees before the restriction starts, and then CSX's contractor shows up and the trees are already gone so they don't have to wait to do their track work.
01:01:16
Did that make sense?
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
01:01:17
Yes, it did.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
01:01:18
Sorry, I wasn't clear on that.
01:01:20
And that, a minute late, ends my presentation.
01:01:24
I apologize.
01:01:25
Any questions for me?
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
01:01:30
No, thank you.
01:01:31
And I think it's fine you were a minute late because we had questions that we wanted to talk through during it.
SPEAKER_13
01:01:35
So thank you.
01:01:36
I appreciate you for that.
01:01:38
I'm always a forgiving chair on that.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
01:01:41
So let's move to our next item, the FY 27 Budget Amendment and Management Reserve.
01:01:45
And I think Laura and others are going to be walking us through that.
01:01:48
Sorry, it looks like Selma is walking
Laura Farmer
Chief Financial Officer
01:01:55
who we met in May that we'd like to amend to the budget.
01:01:58
And so I'm somewhat going to cover that in detail in our literature.
SPEAKER_17
01:02:04
My name is Ellen Bonovitch.
01:02:06
I'm the Director of Financial Planning and Analysis.
01:02:09
And as everyone mentioned, I'm going to be talking about our fiscal year 27 budget amendment and our management reserve.
01:02:17
First, we're going to start by looking at a bird's eye view of our financial plan.
01:02:22
which compares our sources, which are our revenues, to our abuses, which are the expenses from inception of our report program through fiscal year 31.
01:02:32
So I'm going to focus on the bottom section of the slides.
01:02:37
The top section we reviewed during the debate we're meeting.
01:02:40
So the bottom section only reflects the changes since then.
01:02:44
Our sources increased by 72 and a half million dollars
01:02:48
So they went from $7.97 billion to $8.04 billion.
01:02:52
Our use has also increased by the same amount of $72.5 million.
01:02:59
They went from $7.88 billion to $7.95 billion, which results to a net zero impact to our management reserve.
01:03:11
On the next slide, we're going to talk about
01:03:14
The uses side of the changes and as was mentioned previously during the Executive Directors Report, the Richmond Layover Facility project increased by $70 million and this is because of funding that VPRA received to fully fund the project.
01:03:36
We received a $15 million
01:03:40
Grant from the Central Virginia Transportation Authority.
01:03:44
We also received 30 million dollars from the from Amtrak IIJA federal funding.
01:03:50
In addition, we received a 25 million dollar build grant from the FRA to fully fund the project.
01:03:59
Lastly, we have a two and a half million dollar increase in the Fairfax Utilities Project.
01:04:05
and this has resulted to a general increase in construction costs and an addition of a solar road that was required by CSX.
01:04:20
This slide just summarizes changes in our sources and uses.
01:04:24
We talked about the sources on the previous slide and as well as the changes in the uses.
01:04:29
So the net impact to our management reserve is a zero impact
01:04:35
as all as we have received all the funding for our uses.
01:04:44
Again, chose no change in our management reserve balance.
01:04:49
Our program cost estimate increased by the two and a half million dollars of additional funding and increase in project costs.
01:05:01
And finally, this slide shows our preliminary results for a couple of our revenue sources for fiscal year 26.
01:05:09
And I just want to note that our fiscal year 26 results is currently undergoing our annual audit.
01:05:17
So once our financial statements are issued, we will reconcile the results of our sources and uses, and those will be presented to the board in a future reporting.
01:05:28
Laura, I'm not sure if you wanted to add anything to that.
Laura Farmer
Chief Financial Officer
01:05:33
Sure.
01:05:34
Just we're pleased, as I mentioned earlier, that the Commonwealth Rail Fund exceeded the estimate by just over a million dollars.
01:05:41
What we had planned to receive from the 66 inside the facility is slightly short of the estimate we were provided from VDOT.
01:05:49
And so that delta of four million dollars will make up a future adjustment.
01:05:54
In the current plan that VDOT has presented to the Commonwealth Transportation Board, we will receive more pay go in the current year of 2027 that we had not planned on dedicated to Long Bridge.
01:06:05
And so that will more than make up for the difference if it meets its estimate.
01:06:08
So that's a good news story.
01:06:10
And that's also related sort of in with the financing from 66 that we're well underway with today.
SPEAKER_15
01:06:21
Any questions, Beth?
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
01:06:24
The sources and uses, I understand 70 million in sources is three grants.
01:06:31
That 2.5 million, that's going to come to us eventually.
01:06:33
We're going to be reimbursed by Fairfax County.
01:06:35
Is that the source?
Darien Flowers
Member, Board of Directors
01:06:40
Yes.
01:06:40
Okay.
01:06:40
So, I'm going to, Laura, can you talk about, just in the slide, is that, so the $4 million that were different because of the off estimate from VDOT.
01:06:53
What's our plan?
01:06:54
Is that if then in FY 27, right, if they are then off again about their projections for 66 PIGO.
Laura Farmer
Chief Financial Officer
01:07:03
So we continue to look at the sources for the Long Bridge project and then assess whether we need to draw from the rail, the management reserve, to make up for the difference as the project moves forward.
Darien Flowers
Member, Board of Directors
01:07:14
Did they, did we get any detail about like what roads that is the, I guess the current 26 off between their projections, right?
01:07:24
Was it just frankly fewer people were driving or that they weren't, that their calendar was transurban, was not folding enough?
Laura Farmer
Chief Financial Officer
01:07:30
No, so this is actually a VDOT operated facility.
01:07:32
Inside the Beltway is VDOT.
01:07:35
It's a construction feature.
01:07:37
So the inside of the Beltway is what's dedicated to the Long Bridge construction.
01:07:41
So we can receive pay-go funding during this.
01:07:47
We're also going to benefit from the final incentives.
01:07:50
It's estimated at $504 million available.
01:07:57
What this means is that they ask that they derive in the spring of 25 for how the facility we're going to perform.
01:08:05
They have to present a budget to the CTB with a waterfall of expectations.
01:08:09
The O&M is a facility, the commitment to transit in Northern Virginia, and then comes our commitment.
01:08:20
What it means is, yes, to your point, the facility did meet expectations related to ridership, a lot going on in the district, and trying to predict what kind of toll revenue that facility will collect, difficult in recent years.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
01:08:38
Any other questions?
01:08:41
All right.
01:08:43
Are we ready to?
SPEAKER_17
01:08:43
Yes, I believe that.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
01:08:45
Thank you.
01:08:46
So then we need a motion to approve the FY 27 budget amendment and management reserve balance.
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
01:08:54
So moved.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
01:08:55
There's a second.
01:08:56
Ready?
01:08:57
All in favor say aye.
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
01:08:58
Aye.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
01:08:59
Those opposed say nay.
01:09:01
Any abstentions?
01:09:03
The ayes have it.
01:09:05
Alrighty and so next on the agenda is to discuss the VPRA Amtrak 209 agreement.
01:09:14
In case folks haven't heard, Amtrak is in the early stages of a major restructuring designed to increase the transparency and service provided to states and to inform this process the USDOT has selected
01:09:27
A small group of industry leaders to participate in a US delegation on a passenger rail and modernization governance focus.
01:09:36
Both DJ Stadtler and Jennifer Mitchell have been selected to serve as members of this delegation.
01:09:42
So I think that's
01:09:43
Really great for Virginia to have you both there and participating in that.
01:09:48
As part of this program, the group will spend a week in Austria and Spain learning about their rail companies are structured over there, how they manage relationships with national and regional governments and how they manage fleets and facilities.
01:10:00
So this week includes site visits as well as meetings with rail companies and national and regional leading officials.
01:10:07
So again, pretty exciting if you have travel photos or things that you want to share with us.
01:10:16
I'm sure it'll all be work.
01:10:19
The Amtrak restructuring is a pretty significant thing as well.
01:10:24
Again, it's in the early phases, but we also I think benefit from having Jennifer Mitchell on our board who's been involved with that work too.
01:10:31
So Jennifer, if you wouldn't mind maybe just giving us a bit of an update on where things are at with that.
SPEAKER_11
01:10:36
Sure.
01:10:37
So this process began in January of earlier this year.
01:10:45
This was, I would say, brought to us by USDOT.
01:10:49
And we have, however, they've been very clear that we at Amtrak are the ones taking the pen on the actual restructuring plan.
01:10:58
So, as Mariia mentioned, the goal to this is really to improve the transparency, the accountability and focus of the organization as well.
01:11:09
I can just say from a personal standpoint, having been in Virginia for eight years and then at FRA for three, I have worked for the Amtrak in a lot of different
01:11:18
Capacities, and now under their sort of in the organization.
01:11:22
And I can say firsthand that, you know, the organization really does suffer from having a lot of conflicting missions and a lot of conflicting mandates, everything from operating the Northeast Corridor at a profit to rebuilding the Northeast Corridor.
01:11:36
We're now, I think, depending on how you count it, either the fifth or the 12th largest construction company in the United States or as well as then operating state supported service
01:11:46
kind of as a service provider, but then also operating long distance service as a public mission.
01:11:52
So the idea behind this is to create a single parent company with three separate subsidiary companies underneath it.
01:12:03
They would still be governed by a single board, as we have today.
01:12:08
And I should also say this will all be within existing statutory framework that we have today.
01:12:13
We're also not going to change any
01:12:16
of our collective bargaining agreements with labor as well.
01:12:19
So we are working on the, I'd say the organizational redesign and placement of functions in these three separate subsidiaries.
01:12:29
One of those subsidiaries would be an infrastructure manager, one is be a operating company, and then the third would be a rolling stock manager as well.
01:12:38
And then again, under
01:12:39
A parent company that would still have responsibility for strategic alignment of those groups and also shared services.
01:12:46
So our board met in July to sort of consider the first iteration of this plan.
01:12:53
They gave us the direction to continue moving forward on it.
01:12:58
We would expect that if the board decides to approve this to establish those three subsidiaries in December of this year and then continue to move forward with the reorganization really in 2027.
01:13:12
However, the long tent or long pole in the tent is really the IT and financial systems, which is going to take probably two to three years to get that fully established.
01:13:23
That's where we are happy to keep you all updated as that proceeds and what it may also mean for our agreements with VPRA really too soon to really have a lot of detail on that.
01:13:36
Fantastic.
Darien Flowers
Member, Board of Directors
01:13:36
This is like, do our agreements still stay with the holding company then or?
SPEAKER_11
01:13:42
That is still TBD.
01:13:44
But I would say for this purpose of the agreement today, I don't think it should change anything that you would see in the 209 agreement now.
01:13:53
Sorry, that was a little more than 90 seconds.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
01:13:55
No, I think that was really helpful.
Darien Flowers
Member, Board of Directors
01:13:59
Do you think, Madam Chair, listen, I think this is, it's good innovation for Amtrak, right, as a whole.
01:14:06
I do think is that in terms of this agency and this authority, I just, you know, my hope would be is that we maintain the same, I think a comparable level of
01:14:19
Understanding with whatever these new entities are the same way that we do with Norfolk Southern right when we talked about that you know any successor organization based upon their corporate merger like that the same things that we agreed with and that there's the same level of understanding us particularly and the businesses that are both going to shift into the infrastructure operators but then the asset operators when we talk about like the rolling stock right because for us right those things hit you know
01:14:49
They're interoperable even if, then, when our partners at Amtrak, if they are separate functions.
01:14:55
For our purposes as a state supported route, I think it's very important that we kind of continue the understanding that we've previously agreed to.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
01:15:04
If I may, I think you hit it right on the head.
01:15:06
Is our 209 agreement going to be with the operating company or is it going to be with the parent company?
01:15:12
And you could argue either way, but a lot of what we do, especially our capital projects, ties right into their infrastructure.
01:15:18
That's quite a lot of business.
01:15:19
And then also we're reliant on their fleet line of business as well.
01:15:23
So it's going to be, I think the devil's in the details.
01:15:25
I so cliched it, I cliched it.
01:15:28
But I think the good news for us is unlike railroad mergers,
01:15:33
Okay, all right, I'm out of time.
01:15:35
I'm like Roman Mergers.
01:15:38
The people that are running Amtrak are invested in passenger rail because their board of directors, their little board of directors, and also that 535 person board of directors across the street from them, are all invested heavily in states for rail.
01:15:50
I mean, there are 20 different states, 23 different folks, sorry, and each of them have two senators and each of them have a number of representatives that are watching this very, very closely.
01:16:00
So I think our interests are protected here as one of many states, but it's definitely a lot.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
01:16:06
Well, I would also think as we, hearing that timeline, which is a pretty aggressive timeline to move forward.
01:16:13
And for some of us who lived through like the creation of DHS and other things, like when you have that level of transformation, it slows, it's a big slow down on the system, right?
01:16:24
Just even if everything goes perfectly, but there's always the unknown.
01:16:28
And so I think given our very aggressive timeline for what needs to happen over the next year as well, it will be important to
01:16:35
Ensure close coordination and we hope and appreciate that Amtrak.
01:16:41
The company and the board and others will continue to really keep your state partners in the loop on all of this work because we have a lot in play at the moment.
SPEAKER_11
01:16:51
And we are setting we're actually engaging in a very robust public input process right now.
01:16:56
That was very, very high priority of our board as well over the next several months before any final decisions are made.
01:17:04
We also would be planning with the SAPRC, which is the state organization,
01:17:10
that Virginia is also a member of to set up a working group of state members.
01:17:14
That's sort of in process right now where that working group will provide us with a lot of input on these very questions about where the agreements should lie, what they should look like.
01:17:25
Any possible changes in cost policy would have to be taken up by SAPIR-C and all the states as well.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
01:17:31
Thank you.
01:17:32
Thank you, Jennifer.
01:17:33
All righty.
01:17:35
Let's turn to Ashwini, who will talk about the Amtrak 209 operating agreement.
SPEAKER_15
01:17:41
This is the best setup for my presentation.
01:17:46
I feel like I did it by myself.
01:17:50
I'm Shrini Tamane.
01:17:51
I'm the Senior Manager of Operations from EPRA.
01:17:54
I move the lines off track.
01:17:56
and today I'm here to talk about just a quick 101 on what the 209 agreement is, the genesis of the 209 agreement and the state supported routes, who the major players are and what the role is in this whole framework and the benefits that the VPRA leaves from this relationship.
01:18:19
So, PRIA 209, this is a term you'll hear time and time again with the state supported agreement.
01:18:27
And the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act, which was passed in 2008, has a section 209, which specifically deals with state supported routes.
01:18:40
And what it did was it delegated the responsibility of running
01:18:44
or sponsoring any routes less than 750 miles to states.
01:18:49
And that was the genesis of Virginia's service starting up.
01:18:54
Virginia was one of the first states to sign the toll line and they went to 2013, started October 1st.
01:19:01
I want to remind everyone that there is an action item associated with this after this presentation, so setting that up, but where Virginia stands on the northeast, in the northeast region, as we are in the tail end of Amtrak's NEC Corridor, which runs from DC to Boston, and with that strategic location, we are able to put down equipment and service down to Virginia.
01:19:26
There are a lot more players in this
01:19:29
very highly dense passenger network on the Northeast with a lot of commuter agencies also operating in the same territory, one of them being VRA operating in Northern Virginia region.
01:19:43
So see procedure, Jennifer already mentioned this, State Amtrak Industry Passenger Rail Committee.
01:19:50
So when the PR 209 Act was passed in 2008 and state supported services was born,
01:19:58
The federal government quickly realized that the application of the policy needed a framework and needed a body that made it uniform throughout the country and audited it.
01:20:09
Every state can do it and they can own it.
01:20:11
So, SABRC was funded by the federal government.
01:20:15
It is a staff agency.
01:20:16
There are 23 state agencies which are partnered with SABRC on the committee, 20 states, and they oversee
01:20:25
32 routes, four of them being in Virginia.
01:20:29
The committee is comprised of Amtrak, FRA, and state partners.
01:20:32
We are one of them.
01:20:34
And what this gives us is a ticket to an exclusive club.
01:20:38
We cannot afford to find for ourselves individually, so we go at it collectively and through state procedure with Amtrak to not only implement a 209 policy, but to provide wins or settle disputes when they arise.
01:20:53
And specifically,
01:20:54
being with the PR2R section.
01:20:58
So who are the major players?
01:21:00
As I mentioned, there are three entities which are major for the state Amtrak relationship.
01:21:05
SaferSea, their biggest role is implementing and refining the 209 policy.
01:21:11
We started the refinement process of the old policy in 2022, implemented in 2024.
01:21:17
We are still in the process of developing the capital policy.
01:21:23
SaferSea also
01:21:25
develops annual rates, which are for the whole country, for all states.
01:21:31
The rates married with Amtrak operating metrics gives us a forecast.
01:21:34
That's how the costs come to our operating agreement.
01:21:38
But Save-R-See also plays a big facilitator role.
01:21:41
So for the aero procurement, states have a single voice through Save-R-See to say this is what we want and be part of the RFP process.
01:21:50
As Jennifer mentioned, we also have a voice through Save-R-See for Project Orion.
01:21:54
And whenever any discrepancies come up, SABR-C is the body where the FRA, States and Amtrak work together to resolve them.
01:22:02
Amtrak's role in all of this is not only to work with States, but also with SABR-C, you know, deliver service, but also whenever we find policy refinements, the biggest element is implementing them back in the Amtrak system.
01:22:16
You know, refining the financial allocations.
01:22:19
And so they also underplays a big role in implementing the policy on a consistent basis throughout the country.
01:22:29
What this gives us is some service rights.
01:22:32
So we not only pay for our service, but we also able to
01:22:35
decide our schedules or work with Amtrak to come up with schedules.
01:22:40
We can work on station staffing, equipment, service metrics, and then there's other initiatives like the customer service standards agreement, PICS improvements, the big items that leads to the betterment of our service.
01:22:56
So the 209 agreement is what enables us to do all this work with Amtrak.
01:23:02
And then lastly, as I mentioned, there is an action item associated with this presentation.
01:23:09
The FY27-209 agreement will have the operating and capital forecast, schedules of staffing, it's all laid out.
01:23:18
But the biggest thing that also is a benefit of the agreement is we have quarterly meetings between Amtrak and VPRA, and that's a requirement.
01:23:29
and Jennifer attends a lot of those quarterly meetings.
01:23:33
Other EFT members attend those quarterly meetings and we preserve any issues or get consensus whenever there are issues pending between Amtrak and VPRA.
01:23:42
So the 209 actually leaves us to have that kind of relationship with Amtrak.
01:23:48
And then a big part of how the Transforming Rail in Virginia program was born was it came out of the existing 209 relationship for the state supported service with Amtrak.
01:23:59
We already had service here and we built on it.
01:24:04
But the TRD Partnership Funding Agreement, which Amtrak contributed a big amount towards our program, apart from the capital projects, we have customer service standards, which is called out in the Partnership Funding Agreement.
01:24:18
We have service performance that Jeremy usually presents on.
01:24:21
to improve on-time performance in the state.
01:24:23
So those are the big umbrella programs under DRV, but also, you know, FIDS improvements, that came out of the customer service standards programs, the work we do with Amtrak day in and day out.
01:24:35
But again, the backbone of that relationship between Amtrak and VPRA is the two-line agreement.
01:24:43
You know, I would love to see where this goes, but to hold members' comment earlier, you know, it's a good mechanism to keep all parties accountable for delivering service.
01:24:56
So with that, I will turn it to teacher, or actually any questions before I turn it to teacher.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
01:25:06
Thanks Aashwini and I'll just add to that.
01:25:11
We are uniquely situated.
01:25:13
When you look around the table at Safer Sea, there's a lot of animosity might be strong, but we really pride ourselves on the strong relationship we have with Amtrak.
01:25:23
And Amtrak and VPRA, we feel like we're working together for the betterment of passenger rail.
01:25:30
And there are a lot of states that feel like they're working together for the betterment of their state.
01:25:34
Because we're so closely connected to the Northeast Quarter, we want everything to be successful.
01:25:39
And that puts us, I think, in a good position to be successful and to be one of the leaders of the states across the country.
01:25:47
So thank you, Ashwini.
01:25:47
What we're looking for today is approval for me to be able to enter into agreement the next year's 209 agreement with Amtrak,
01:25:56
None of the rates are finalized, but it's also not something we can negotiate because it just gets spit out of the safety models.
01:26:02
So we're looking for your approval to have me enter into that agreement when those numbers are ready, probably September 30th at about midnight.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
01:26:11
Thank you, DJ.
01:26:12
So, yes.
01:26:13
So moved.
01:26:14
DJ with second.
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
01:26:16
Second.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
01:26:18
All in favor of writing the authority to execute the FY27 agreement.
01:26:23
Say aye.
01:26:25
Opposed, say nay.
01:26:27
Any abstentions?
01:26:29
I just have it.
01:26:30
Thank you.
01:26:31
Okay, so our last item before lunch, make sure we're on a time check here.
01:26:36
Yep, we're looking good.
01:26:38
We're going to have an update on the Fed and state legislation by Benjamin and Jessica.
SPEAKER_05
01:26:48
Hi, Mr.
01:26:48
Chair, members of the board, it's a pleasure to be here.
SPEAKER_04
01:26:50
My name is Benjamin Jarvelo.
01:26:52
I am the Incoming Director of External Affairs and Communications for VPRA, replacing Jeremy Goodman.
SPEAKER_05
01:26:57
For those of you who are familiar, I've been doing this for a little under 30 years and have previously led comms operations at three other Virginia state agencies.
01:27:05
Very happy to be here.
01:27:06
It's a very exciting time to join the team.
01:27:08
Jessica's got some points she's going to lead through what we're looking at at the Gulf of the Fairs picture moving forward.
SPEAKER_09
01:27:13
Hi.
01:27:16
Good afternoon, everyone.
01:27:18
So far, I'm the only person standing between you and lunch.
Laura Farmer
Chief Financial Officer
01:27:22
My name is Jessica Eglin, I'm the Government Affairs Manager here with BPRA.
01:27:25
Thank you for giving me a couple minutes to provide you with an update of what's been going on at the federal and state government.
SPEAKER_09
01:27:30
If you didn't know, Congress, the House and Senate have been in recess for the last couple of weeks for August.
01:27:35
They'll return next week Monday, August 31st.
01:27:39
When they return, they have a couple of big pieces of legislation that they really need to figure out before they recess in October for campaigning for the November election.
01:27:46
That includes the FY 27 budget and then reauthorizations of the investment infrastructure and jobs, FKA or the search transportation reauthorization package.
01:27:57
Both of those are set to expire at eleven fifty nine on September 30th.
01:28:01
Before the House left a couple weeks ago, they did pass a continuing resolution that would fund the government at its current funding levels until December 4th.
01:28:10
The Senate passed a different continuing resolution that will fund the government until December 11th at the current funding levels.
01:28:16
The Senate CR also included funding for the surface transportation reauthorization programs, so it would continue that funding until December 11th as well.
01:28:25
The ICR did not include those advanced multi-year appropriations that we saw in Division J of the IIJA, so it would be an immediate decrease in transportation and rail funding in the future.
01:28:38
The House is expected to take off the Senate's version of the CR with a return next week.
01:28:42
Hopefully they'll pass it.
01:28:43
It'll get signed into law.
01:28:44
I will have a little bit of time for Congress to figure out a full FY 27 budget and a next service transportation reauthorization package.
01:28:53
Before the House left, they did pass their version of the IIJA reauthorization.
01:28:58
It's called the Build America 250 Act.
01:29:00
It passed as a committee bipartisan.
01:29:03
However, it has not come up for a floor vote.
01:29:05
There's some difference in opinions as it relates to the two crew freight rule in there and then fees on electric vehicles.
01:29:15
The Senate has yet to release a package for the surface transportation reauthorization.
01:29:19
We're still waiting to see anything come out of that.
01:29:21
So hopefully when they return next week, we'll be able to pass a continuing resolution on both those pieces of legislation to give them a little bit more time to negotiate two full packages.
01:29:31
I will mention it's Virginia.
01:29:34
We have an election.
01:29:35
We have an election every year.
01:29:37
This one is for the federal election.
01:29:38
It's on November 3rd.
01:29:39
Early voting in Virginia actually starts in September on the 18th.
01:29:44
All U.S. congressional members are up for election.
01:29:46
33 senators including Mark Warner here in Virginia and some local elections depending on where you're at are
01:29:52
in November.
01:29:54
There's a couple competitive races here in Virginia that we're watching.
01:29:56
We could see some new members of Congress next year.
01:29:59
One of the competitive races is Congressional District 1, which is represented by Republican Congressman Rob Whitman.
01:30:05
He's in that sort of central Virginia area.
01:30:08
He is running against Democrat Shannon Taylor, who, if you didn't know, she ran in the Democratic Attorney General primary last year.
01:30:16
And then the other race we're watching is Congressional District 2, which is Congresswoman Jen Kiggins.
01:30:21
She is running against Democrat Elaine Maria, who was a former congressional member in that seat a couple of Congresses ago.
01:30:29
So just keep your eye out.
01:30:30
We might have some new members that will be needing to brief these projects on in the future.
01:30:35
Okay, as for the state legislature, quick reminder of what we did this year in 2026.
01:30:41
VPRA had two pieces of legislation that were ultimately signed into law and they became effective earlier this year on July 1.
01:30:48
Those bills are HB 141, which was led by Delegate Reed,
01:30:52
This bill was just really focused, it was a clean up bill, it was really focused on updating the exemptions that are in our enabling legislation and then garnering us some exemptions that other transportation agencies like BDOT enjoy that we thought would be useful in the future to help us stay on time and on budget for our projects.
01:31:09
The second bill was HB446, which was led by Delegate Simon,
01:31:13
It really focused on clarifying our eminent domain and quick take procedures so it aligns with the rest of Virginia common doors including VDOT.
01:31:23
The board voted on, oh sorry.
01:31:26
I did miss a portion of Delegate Reads Bill, sorry.
01:31:29
There was a second portion to that bill, if you guys voted on it last, or related to our procurement bylaws.
01:31:35
It basically just increased our threshold for project interim caps for architectural and engineering services.
01:31:41
And it's been mostly used for planning purposes in the future.
01:31:45
Sorry about that.
01:31:46
Like I said, Delegate Reads Bill, Delegate Science Bill was really focused on aligning our main process with the rest of Virginia.
01:31:53
As for this upcoming General Assembly session in 2027, it is a short cycle.
01:31:57
It's only 45 days long compared to the 60 days we experienced this year.
01:32:01
So not a big difference.
01:32:03
It will start at the beginning of January.
01:32:05
We do not have any bills that we are leading at this time or planning to lead at this time.
01:32:09
We probably won't have anything.
01:32:11
Our main focus will be keeping legislators informed of the upcoming construction impacts that we're going to see throughout the state, particularly over in Leland Road and Newington Road.
01:32:22
Okay, and then there was a mention that we'd like some updates on Quarter IT.
01:32:27
If you guys don't know what Quarter IT is, it is a federal program that helps divide rail borders through early system planning and project development so that they can be competitive for federal construction, federal funding in the future.
01:32:39
We have two corridors that are in the Quarter IT process.
01:32:43
One of them is Bristol to DC.
01:32:45
The other one is the Commonwealth Corridor, so Roanoke, Charlottesville, Richmond to Williamsburg.
01:32:50
In July of this year, DRPT, who is leading the quarter IT process, submitted the step one application to FRA.
01:32:59
This process includes creating a scope of work, a schedule, and a budget.
01:33:03
They're expecting FRA to advance our step one into step two sometime in the fall of this year, but please note that it's all based on the federal government obligating additional funds to quarter IT, so that is something we'll be compact to make sure that that funding is included in either the FY 27 package or the surface transportation reauthorization bill.
01:33:24
DRPT is expecting the service development portion for both quarters to last about three years and so they'll continue working through this process with us and other state and stakeholders and hopefully we'll see some funding for it in these quarters move through.
01:33:42
I know that was a lot of information in a very short amount of time, so I'm happy to answer any questions.
01:33:48
If you would like to just make your way to lunch, please know that I'm always available.
01:33:53
I'm happy to chat in more details before, after, or at a different point.
01:33:57
Thank you guys.
01:33:58
Any questions?
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
01:34:03
All righty, thank you.
01:34:04
We will break for lunch.
01:34:07
We're just a couple minutes over, but hopefully it still works to reconvene at 1230.
01:34:11
That work for everyone?
01:34:13
All righty, well, we will adjourn then until 1230.
02:00:23
Alrighty, we will now move into what is always, I think, exciting for us is to get the project and construction updates.
02:00:36
So we have a number of staff, I think, Michael, you're starting us off here, Michael Westermann.
SPEAKER_05
02:00:41
Alrighty, so thank you.
SPEAKER_17
02:00:47
Thank you.
SPEAKER_05
02:00:50
Yielded that responsibility after the
02:00:56
Here's our picture of right-of-way acquisitions.
02:01:00
Folks who are new may not remember, when we talk about right-of-way acquisitions, this is when we're doing a construction project and we need to use somebody else's land for a purpose.
02:01:09
Maybe it's accessing our project site, maybe it's a permanent purpose, maybe we're going to locate a bridge through there, but we don't own enough land ourselves, so we have to go to the adjacent landowners and acquire property interest from them to accomplish the projects.
02:01:24
So just kind of going down the list, I'll say every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
02:01:31
Right now we're in the middle of a right-of-way story.
02:01:33
The beginning chapters were not so great though.
02:01:36
We remember some of the early discussions about the evaluation maps and boundary lines and deciding the boundary lines and not understanding the
02:01:46
The actual ownership of paint leaves.
02:01:48
Well, the good news is we're not sold everywhere.
02:01:51
We have objects away.
02:01:53
We have survey boundary lines.
02:01:54
We have recorded them in the clerk's office on the courts.
02:01:59
The official boundary lines of the railroad are so we know exactly what we need to acquire.
02:02:03
We know from whom we need to acquire.
02:02:05
We know the exact rights we need to acquire.
02:02:07
So that hard challenging stuff from a couple of years ago is behind us.
02:02:12
So now you can see we're in the throes of it and we are acquiring property interests
02:02:17
Rapidly.
02:02:18
Starting at the top, Long Bridge North, you can see we've acquired three out of the 10 necessary parcels.
02:02:24
That can be a little bit misleading only because we're a little farther along than that would indicate.
02:02:31
Of the remaining seven, only three are private parties that we're acquiring from.
02:02:36
I would describe all three of those as on the one yard line.
02:02:40
We have 40 steps to this meeting to counsel for those landowners.
02:02:44
and those are going to be applied immediately and billed at the next time.
02:02:50
The balance, the other board interests are public agencies, whether it's the district of Columbia, whether it's La Mota or National Park Service, those public acquisitions take us to the public entity as a counter plugin.
02:03:06
The good thing there is we have access to the parcels for construction purposes and the permits for those governmental entities and it's just a matter of time.
02:03:17
So, although it shows three out of ten, we're actually in very good shape and on track to do both of those parcels.
02:03:22
Long Bridge South, we have one outstanding parcel, again, that one is a test, that's from Park Service, so while we know we have to get it eventually, we're going to work on it for a minute, we could acquire those entries, so we have what we need for construction purposes, as far as that's concerned.
02:03:40
So again, your fourth track, we're going to take almost identical posture, we have three remaining parcels to acquire from the model.
02:03:47
Everything's acquired from bypass.
02:03:50
That's good news.
02:03:51
And then, okay, so where is it really?
02:03:52
Let me skip these two projects right now.
02:03:55
ETRIP, we're showing one of two since the day we made these slides, since Anderson and Ford, we've acquired that second one.
02:04:01
So we're completely completed for ETRIP.
02:04:04
So where is the real work happening?
02:04:05
It's happening in these two projects.
02:04:07
For ETRIP, third track and siding A, we are very much
02:04:12
We're working diligently to get all those parcels acquired.
02:04:15
I believe we have offers out to all landowners, just about all landowners.
02:04:22
And we have that.
02:04:27
We have seven condemnation cases of these projects.
02:04:34
We have a few more in the pipeline that we're likely to follow.
02:04:37
Just so everybody understands, we are impacting very few private entities, private landowners.
02:04:44
We are generally required to have LLCs, developers.
02:04:50
One of our biggest activities is interprofessional parking.
02:04:52
We have acquired a large gravel parking lot as a construction laid out area for.
02:04:59
The impacts we're having to actually private residential folks are very minimal.
02:05:04
They're
02:05:06
of Eastman, Strange Eastman, Slade on Eastman, low dollar values, and also low impact on the actual folks that say that.
02:05:13
So you don't, you hear me say confirmation for not taking out, kicking folks off their land right where they are, having very minimal impacts.
02:05:24
So I guess that's the right of way we've been updated in a nutshell.
02:05:29
We're making a lot of progress.
02:05:31
It's on track to deliver
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
02:05:35
Can I just add, not only are we only taking slivers, there are multiple situations where we've gone to property owners and said, hey, this 10 feet of land that you own in your backyard, we'd like to take that from you and compensate you for it.
02:05:50
And they've come back and said, I don't know that the railroad owns it.
02:05:52
So it's, these are not, you undertake, they're huge undertakings and you're right at the beginning of the story.
02:05:59
I don't know whether it's comedy or horror, but we're in a good place now.
02:06:03
The point is, is that these are not impacting private homeowners.
SPEAKER_05
02:06:05
And when we talk about condemnation, also we have situations where we have a homeowner's association and we need a nice, long, usable plan that involves a homeowner's association to give us a plan, maybe to give a certain percentage of all members of that
02:06:40
Okay, we need to go to court and actually proceed in condemnation.
02:06:43
Nobody's mad at us.
02:06:45
It's not controversial.
02:06:46
We just can't get spokes' attention to actually acquire the land.
02:06:49
There's another set of folks who are heirs to a deceased person, siblings.
02:06:56
They can't all agree on how to do the land transaction.
02:07:01
So we have some who would like to cooperate, some who might impact the project schedule.
02:07:12
A good thing for the landowners is when we do the report for it, the foundation has to deposit with the Corps the value of the land, and the landowners get that money immediately.
02:07:22
As soon as we deposit it in the Corps, they can have access to it.
02:07:25
So they don't have to wait for the money.
02:07:27
We're arguing about valuation, so they get, or feeding the land as far as they might have to actually go through the process to figure out if we should pay more or less.
02:07:36
All right.
02:07:38
Are there any questions about our pathway after this
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
02:07:43
I have a question.
SPEAKER_05
02:07:44
Yes.
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
02:07:44
So I want to go back to the condemnation process.
02:07:47
So it's initiated by us.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
02:07:49
Yes.
02:07:50
And kind of the way you describe it seems like it's a bit of a strategy.
02:07:57
Can you expand on that?
SPEAKER_05
02:08:00
Yeah, the process.
02:08:02
How do you?
02:08:04
So are you going to take the step to go?
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
02:08:09
Yeah, what are the triggers?
SPEAKER_05
02:08:10
That's a really good question.
02:08:13
Live in America, private property rights, sacrosanct.
02:08:17
Individual liberties are sacrosanct, right?
02:08:20
So when you have a set of laws that say a government can come and impact private property against a local private owner, we have a law in place of procedural laws that we have to follow, notice, appraise, making plans, giving them the power their project is going to be impacted, making an offer of just compensation based on the appraised value of the land,
02:08:42
and going through a certain period of time trying to negotiate in good faith with the landowner to acquire a volunteer.
02:08:49
Only when that breaks down do we then go to condemnation.
02:08:53
And we don't go right away.
02:08:55
We keep trying to get a voluntary transaction with the landowner until we look at the project schedule and say, okay, the project schedule is now in danger unless we are going to, unless we go to file appropriate paperwork to actually apply our title to this land against the landowners.
02:09:13
So the short answer is, when it's going to impact our project schedule and make it late, that would be the deciding factor to take that last option.
02:09:24
Okay.
02:09:24
Does that answer the question?
Darien Flowers
Member, Board of Directors
02:09:28
It does.
SPEAKER_05
02:09:28
Okay.
02:09:32
I'll change the arm.
02:09:34
Okay.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
02:09:37
So recall,
02:09:39
Back in May, we talked about utilities and utility relocation through the project.
02:09:45
So, we thought we'd bring in John Carney, our resident expert.
02:09:50
John, a few years ago, came up building a lot of Silver Line.
02:09:54
So, he has a lot of experience dealing with utilities.
02:09:57
So, I want to introduce John, the Vice President of Construction.
02:10:03
And again, we'll get into a little more details.
02:10:06
Now, keep in mind, we did go into closed session back in May, because there could be some aspects of this that could impact some of our contracts.
02:10:15
So we still thought we should brief you today.
02:10:18
If that moment arises that we feel like there's some questions that arise, we can adjust it.
02:10:29
If it warrants a closed session vote.
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
02:10:38
Thank you John and appreciate that Mike said that I'm an expert in utilities.
02:10:45
No one's an expert.
02:10:47
It's ever changing.
02:10:49
So the industry is an amazing industry.
02:10:53
But what it does in the field, it's just very complex.
02:10:57
So what we have is all of these utilities that are actually routed along the railroad corridor.
02:11:01
Because it is connected.
02:11:03
Realize every time that they change an intersection on a highway, modify highway, then modify those utilities also.
02:11:09
Put them in a railroad order.
02:11:11
Most times those are going to stay there for a long time, very often.
02:11:14
So what's happened now is here we come.
02:11:17
We're building projects.
02:11:18
We have been putting up all these giant to get them to put them in a railroad.
02:11:23
Not easily done.
02:11:25
So a friend of the CSX have those arrangements with each one of the utilities on the corridor.
02:11:32
So the utilities have to abide by whatever CSX says.
02:11:36
We work with them to get them out of the way.
02:11:38
We did not have the access to each one of those utilities because, again, those were under CSX.
02:11:45
We were just in here, at some point getting the projects built.
02:11:49
So we worked out an arrangement with Rail Pros, who was the CSX
02:11:53
and Michael's help putting together an arrangement that we would work with railroads.
02:12:03
We now have the ability to communicate directly with the utilities.
02:12:06
We also have the ability to use railroads as an agent working for us to move things faster.
02:12:12
Through all of this, we've gone through quite a few efforts to get everything organized and the future slides will show that
02:12:21
As you can see, there's several different types of utilities that are out here.
02:12:25
Mainly the ones that have caused the biggest difficulties are not the ones you would think.
02:12:30
It's not the power companies and it's not the water companies and things like that.
02:12:34
It's more of the petroleum mines that are out in the ground.
02:12:38
To date, Michael's benefit and the help that Michael has given us has been great because we now have, in a range, one of the barriers for the signal.
02:12:54
Let's just say a lot of the government segments go through the loading systems.
02:12:59
So then we also have agreement with Kinder Morgan, which is the petroleum pipeline that runs along the length of the corridor.
02:13:05
So I'll get into that a little bit.
02:13:09
Okay, this looks complex.
02:13:11
This is my life.
02:13:15
So this schematic on the right, I apologize for this, but it's very detailed because if you look on the left side of the screen, that's where the pentagon is.
02:13:24
Look on the right side of the screen, that's where DC is.
02:13:26
So there's a lot of coordination between everything between those two points.
02:13:31
That's what this represents.
02:13:32
This is what the Long Bridge Project brings to the table.
02:13:34
So through that, the majority of the utilities, it says, you know, are the fiber ops that are shown here.
02:13:40
The others, for the most part, have been already moved aside.
02:13:44
We do not have Kinder Morgan this far north.
02:13:46
They only supply fuel up to the Meghan Airport, and it comes up the corridor, so you'll see that in the future.
02:13:53
But that pipeline not being here is a blessing, to be honest with you.
02:13:57
But we get across the Potomac River with all this material, this actually is a nice, right, left, right, again,
02:14:04
And actually on the bottom, it shows that we're in the existing manhole systems in DC, so we don't have to actually add any of this in.
02:14:13
The effort is to take all the utilities, get them out of the corridor, while we build a modification, put in a new pathway for the vehicle transfer over to CSX, bring all those utilities back in.
02:14:24
That's mainly just with the communication lines.
02:14:27
So that is what this represents.
02:14:30
We do have a concern about the timing of cable deliveries for lumen and its land stream.
02:14:34
We've been able to, through Michael's help again, been able to get support through the women organization that they moved the deadline up when they said they would bring our cable, that we now have confidence that that'll be in time to support this project for the Long Bridge and Windstream also.
02:14:51
Their dates were actually sliding.
02:14:53
We were able to get their attention.
02:14:55
They actually worked with us to bring it back into line.
02:14:59
Working our way south, this is a picture on the right that once again shares what you find when you do a little bit of excavating out in the field.
02:15:08
And Dallas is very familiar with this.
02:15:11
So this is an area where we see all of these varying conduits that are running in the ground.
02:15:16
And when you open it up, you have no idea who's in there.
02:15:18
So we work through each one of the companies that we know are out there participating and have lines.
02:15:23
We get them relocated.
02:15:24
We know that they're out, but we still have
02:15:31
So the city of Alexandria still has a sanitary line that we're trying to work through, getting that relocated so we can modify the track location on the south end down by the, south of a, by Telegraph Road actually is where that one is.
02:15:46
So again, Windstream is one of the outliers here that we're trying to make sure that they have the cables here along with both.
02:15:53
Working your way down again.
02:15:54
This is the Franconia corridor.
02:15:56
This includes the bypass.
02:15:58
So we have the area that on the right, it's just showing, coming from up at the Franconia Station, MCI, which is on the bottom here, and the drills underneath the existing platform and the future platform expansion and the tunnel that'll be built by the VRE at that station.
02:16:21
So coordinating that to make sure that all happened in time.
02:16:23
working out with auto because it really immediately adjacent to their property.
02:16:27
All of those things are things we had to work through.
02:16:30
Henry Morgan, we've been working with them.
02:16:32
Michael, again, stepped in, helped us to turn this forward to where we believe we have to have forward to get this working to cover a little bit of time that we are expecting would be a problem for us.
02:16:43
And then the tubing issue on top there, we have contents that they have now secured enough cable to be able to meet our schedule or get their cables in the ground to support our schedule if that's possible.
02:16:56
and then Siding A down in Spatula.
02:16:59
So this is, again, dinner Morgan, you're going to see them all through most of the corn.
02:17:03
This is now, let's get some, the subsequent river and then we end up coming up through here and they actually are right in an area that they actually
02:17:21
That we are going to be building for the future Leland Road Bridge expansion.
02:17:27
So we're doing it.
02:17:28
We have the coordinate getting them to move in time.
02:17:31
That is one of the things that we're working very hard to get that range so that they meet our schedule.
02:17:38
Again, same situation.
02:17:39
They're out there.
02:17:40
They're in an area that we have to have them relocated.
02:17:43
They've been out there putting conduits in the ground.
02:17:45
So they're supporting us.
02:17:46
They're moving forward.
02:17:47
They're in construction.
02:17:48
The Horizon and then the secret in NCI
02:17:51
Both of them are working with us to get this done.
02:17:54
We've all coordinated in the field.
02:17:55
We have everything arranged, fabric, family, sewer.
02:17:58
This is an ongoing effort to get things coordinated so that we can continue to move things.
02:18:03
This is where we're trying to get it cleared up because this project will be a lead by CSX.
02:18:08
And that's where we have to get all of this built out of the way so they have access to get in there and do their work.
SPEAKER_20
02:18:17
I think that's it.
02:18:17
Or you can tell we still use.
02:18:22
So, in terms of the people that you're working with, Kendra Morgan, MCI, what have you, is there any obvious risk to one or another project being put at risk if they hit a roadblock or, you know, how much flow are we given here to get these things done?
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
02:18:43
To follow up with your thought on it, the thought is here, yes, there is always that risk with any of these utilities.
SPEAKER_05
02:18:54
for Blumen to get material in time and for Windstream to get material in time.
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
02:18:58
If their fabricator doesn't supply them with that material in time, if it comes out that's not adequate for their purposes, they can't accept it.
02:19:06
That pushes against our schedule.
02:19:07
So those are always the risks.
02:19:13
We've had that as a risk, and it would always be a risk until we actually turn those over where it's in the new position.
02:19:26
So I don't know if that answered your question.
SPEAKER_20
02:19:28
No, it does.
02:19:28
It does.
02:19:29
I just didn't know whether or not we were just so dependent on one contract or one partner or another.
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
02:19:37
in order
02:20:05
Jonathan New, that starts the clock all over again.
02:20:08
That hits our schedule very hard.
02:20:10
And that's where Michael was able to step in, set up a letter to get the company to recognize that what it's doing is our schedules and the cost that it's causing us, potential.
02:20:21
And then that got their attention.
02:20:24
They quickly went back throughout the entire nation and brought in what had been
02:20:32
making use of now to take care of the Long Bridge project, Franconia, and also up at the AFNR.
SPEAKER_13
02:20:40
Can I just add, I think VPRA has done a great job mitigating the impacts of the utility challenges, but VRE is already experiencing problems on our contracts because of this.
02:20:52
So it's, you know, this is a program, half of which is being done by VPRA and the other half being done by VRE.
02:20:58
And so we are already experiencing schedule delays on Alexandria project due to the utility relocations as well as Franconia Springfield.
02:21:07
We haven't been we can't get our bids out until this utility work is is completed or we have a better schedule for that.
02:21:14
And then as and if the fourth track project is impacted, that will end up impacting both Juan Font and Crystal City.
02:21:22
So there's a lot of interrelationships here with all the projects and all of this work that we're keeping a very close eye on, but it certainly is, you know, we haven't skirted the problem at this point.
02:21:32
We're already experiencing it.
SPEAKER_11
02:21:34
Are you all providing funding to them for any of this relocation?
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
02:21:40
Different utility by utility.
02:21:42
Each one has a different agreement and part of it is that there are some utilities that are responsible for funding and quite frequently in those relationships they have to fund it but they don't have a time cut.
02:21:54
So the sense of urgency goes away and that's a balance that we need to watch.
SPEAKER_11
02:22:00
We have been out in other parts of the country experiencing significant issues with utilities accepting federal flow down, which has been a major issue.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
02:22:12
I don't know that we've had that issue yet.
02:22:14
Okay, good.
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
02:22:15
It's a Buy America, isn't it now?
02:22:17
Is that a Buy America issue if you touch federal funds?
02:22:20
That's why they don't want it.
SPEAKER_05
02:22:21
I think that's one of the flow downs that they probably...
SPEAKER_11
02:22:24
I'm glad to hear you're not having that.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
02:22:29
Can I ask a question though?
02:22:30
So with the, where we are purchasing right-of-way or even thinking about them in assets line or other things like repurchase from, does that agreement between CSX and the utility owners remain with CSX even when we're...
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
02:22:45
The host railroads have been consistent.
02:22:48
The revenue stream that they secure from utilities will remain with them.
02:22:52
Regardless of the ownership.
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
02:22:55
It sounds like we've been pretty effective with the strongly-warded Michael Westermann letter, right?
02:23:00
And getting what we want?
SPEAKER_05
02:23:02
Michael and I stay right next to each other.
02:23:04
I know this story as well.
02:23:07
We'll have the last cap and put it out the way that we hope they do.
02:23:11
And the utilities have woken up and we're working well together.
02:23:15
I think maybe you could give us an understatement.
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
02:23:32
Take advantage of their skills and their ability to communicate with some of these utility companies that we may not have had the opportunity to have a relationship with, but now they're benefiting from the fact that we also have relationships with utilities and CSX is benefiting from both of those parties having those relationships because we're trying for something to happen in our schedule rather than in the schedule that maybe somebody else would say, well, we'll get to that sometime in the future.
02:23:59
There are other things that they pay close
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
02:24:04
And let me just add, you all have all heard me say, no surprises, no surprises.
02:24:10
And we brought plenty of bad news to this fourth past.
02:24:13
When we set this agenda, the third week of July, this conversation was a very different conversation than what you're hearing today.
02:24:20
And that's because of the work of the team.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
02:24:30
We're going to talk about a couple of projects that
02:24:34
Labeling funding updates because we might come to you with a request for some changes in funding.
SPEAKER_18
02:24:43
Good afternoon, Chair.
02:24:44
Remember, my name is Jeff Peltier.
02:24:46
I'm the Senior Director of Engineering and Construction at the Board of Virginia.
02:24:50
We have one project at NOVA that's going to be finalizing its budget in the fiscal year, so we wanted to get the board updated on what's happened there at this point.
02:24:57
There are a few details on it earlier this morning.
02:25:00
The Franconia-Lorton Third Track, as many of you know, this is the project that's going to add six miles of new third mainline track to where it currently leaves off, just north of the Franconia Springfield B.E.R.E.
02:25:10
Station to just south of the B.E.R.E.
02:25:13
Lorton Station, south of Lorton-Brevard.
02:25:16
This is going to fully replace the railroad bridge over public creek.
02:25:20
It's going to widen bridges over North Road, Atkinson Creek, and it's also going to replace the current railroad bridge over Newington.
02:25:29
Newington Road, while we show it as a separate project for all practical purposes, it is part of the third track project.
02:25:35
It is going to be delivered as part of Third Track.
02:25:38
However, we do show it separately because it does have some different funding sources.
02:25:42
We have some money from VDOT as well as a separate state of good repair grant from the FRA.
02:25:48
CSX is leading design and construction for Third Track.
02:25:51
It actually just completed some early works on the new control point.
02:25:55
We'll talk about that a little bit more later.
02:26:00
We're at 100% design, as Michael showed, right-of-way acquisition is well underway and I would say a month from now that number will look better than it did that we just presented.
02:26:12
But the good news and the highlight is that CSX has put a construction invitation for bid out.
02:26:19
They did it on August 7th and we're expecting bids to come in in October and we're looking for CSX to award that contract in late November, early December.
02:26:30
I'm going ahead with a multi-step move to proceed with this project.
02:26:34
Unlike the tree clearing work that DJ making at VPRA is taking on.
02:26:38
This procurement does sync up with the tree clearing windows that we have for the federally protected endangered bats species.
02:26:45
So what we're going to do is CSX is going to award the contract, they're going to do NTP1 for that contract to go out there and start tree clearing in November, December through the window that expires in March.
02:26:57
And then once that work is done, and hopefully some more of the utilities are relocated as well, we'll issue NTP2 to the full construction
02:27:05
by June of next year.
02:27:07
So good things happening.
02:27:09
We're actually in the act of procurement, so we're looking forward to having good news for the board in November as well.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
02:27:18
Any questions for Jeff?
02:27:24
Over Creek, Third Track South, this is around Leland Road Station.
02:27:29
You see Leland Road, there's a VRE Leland Station there.
02:27:34
We're starting to bring projects to your attention about a year or so before they go to construction, hence why this is in the slide.
02:27:44
We have already procured our
02:27:47
Contractor for the Leland Railroad overpass rebuild.
02:27:50
So this budget is separate from that.
02:27:53
As you can see, we do plan to go to a bid advertisement next spring.
02:27:58
CSX will do that.
02:27:59
We're working with them now.
02:28:00
One thing we will plan to do though through our bench contract is clear trees before that.
02:28:07
So we're looking to clear trees for not just this project, but for other sidings.
02:28:12
Siding C, which is tailors won't hand over
02:28:15
Citing D, which is just south of Woodbridge Station, Citing E and F further south.
02:28:21
Actually, E is just north of here at Brooks Station and F is down by the Spotsylvania Station.
02:28:27
So, again, we are looking at opportunities every chance we can to try to clear trees, as we discussed before.
02:28:34
This is a project, again, to get closer to the bid.
02:28:38
And next May, when those bids are due and the bids come in, if we need a budget adjustment, we'll come to you accordingly.
02:28:48
Happy to answer any questions.
02:28:54
I think I stay up there because I think we're loading construction updates.
SPEAKER_00
02:29:02
Ready?
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
02:29:04
Do you have them ready?
02:29:05
Yeah.
02:29:06
We have a little video.
02:29:06
I think I started right away.
02:29:08
Give the video a couple of minutes before it brings people up to talk about them in a little more detail.
02:31:48
What's happening in two and a half minutes.
02:31:51
We are going to dive into these a little bit.
02:31:54
I'll tee it up for folks before they come on up.
02:31:56
Again, we do, especially with new board members, we do like to talk about prosecutor construction and you can see their estimated completion date and their product cost.
02:32:05
And with that, I think we're going to go to John to talk about the John overseas, the Long Bridge team, Mr. Lien and Ian who have been for us
02:32:16
that they're working on daily basis.
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
02:32:21
So on the Long Bridge project, we've got on the bottom here showing you things that have been completed recently that we're pretty proud of that we've been able to move forward with that.
02:32:30
You've seen in the video there a lot of shots of the teams being out there night, day, weekends, whenever.
02:32:36
We've worked with the CSX and with Amtrak and BRE to get some work windows to be able to make better use of time
02:32:49
of course.
02:32:51
So ongoing work, the work that you'll see in these upcoming pictures is just going to show you how close and tight everything is as you get across the bridge into the north side of the Potomac River.
02:33:02
That means that you're in an area where very congested traffic, trying to make sure that the new work is accessible.
02:33:10
So we also have to work with all of the other features in the area, including the adjacent properties, along with keeping the noise down because we can't work at night with a lot of pile driving or any other activities.
02:33:20
Even some equipment makes some very loud noise.
02:33:23
So that work is ongoing.
02:33:25
Upcoming work, as you can see on the right, we've got a lot of things that we've got our sights on because we're getting everything teed up.
02:33:31
We'll be able to get that work underway.
02:33:34
This picture on the left shows that the new single bridge has been erected.
02:33:39
CSX was responsible to set this bridge.
02:33:42
Foundations were put in by our contractor, SFJV, Skanska Flatiron, and then the foundation system, and then the bridge, and then the supporting utilities to it, then all is complete.
02:33:54
Now it should be activated each Saturday night is when that is going to be active and the old system can be removed.
02:34:10
lights up above.
02:34:12
The wall on the left, that's retaining wall L. It will be a track that will be built immediately adjacent to that.
02:34:19
You can see on the end of it, it stops operating there, but that is going to be expanded and further with more posted panel work that is going to take place in the future.
02:34:29
I'll show you some film on that.
02:34:30
The wall on the right, and we're proud of that one, that one we were able to finish up, and that one is in Pier 2, that's in Main Avenue.
02:34:39
This is where, this picture is taken of where we have changed the road surface, changed the line, finished our utility work beneath this and allowed now for this to be paved and we will be shifting traffic over here so that we are able to move it over into an expansion of the wall that I just showed you.
02:34:58
In the median of this area, the bridge you see in the distance, that's the existing pedestrian entrance going from the salamander hotel back to the marina parking lot.
02:35:16
The picture on the right, that's the retaining wall L. That's what I was referring to earlier.
02:35:23
These foundations have to go away.
02:35:25
That's the amount of load that those have to actually carry once we do set that in place.
02:35:29
And it'll have rail traffic immediately on top of it.
02:35:32
So it's about 20 feet of area that has to be retained in elevation.
02:35:38
And that is a lot of lateral force.
02:35:41
So we're trying to make this as
02:35:47
get ready for that post and panel work so we can move that forward.
02:35:52
This is on the left 14th Street off ramp.
02:35:54
If you're familiar with that, 14th Street is on your right.
02:35:57
The rail corridor is on your left.
02:35:59
And then 14th Street off ramp that's been closed.
02:36:01
We're hoping to keep that closed for the duration of the project.
02:36:04
Right now we have an arrangement that will be keeping it about 18 months.
02:36:07
We're hoping to expand that.
02:36:08
We're making use of it not only for, you know, our equipment being
02:36:15
but up on top you can see where they're actually driving micro-piles to reinforce that soil up there and put in the retaining system that'll have to hold that because we have to peel that wall away and expand that out toward the ramp in the future.
02:36:33
So on the right, those are the conduits that are, back to utilities, those are the conduits for the utilities that have to be relocated that they will ultimately be placed in there
02:36:49
These utility conduits will then carry all of the signals through up to Virginia Tower, which is north.
02:36:59
This is Wall G and Ohio Drive bridge.
02:37:03
The Wall G is in the distance.
02:37:05
You can see that they're pouring concrete down on the distance there and then back toward us.
02:37:11
This is where the abutment will be for
02:37:16
of Ohio Drive.
02:37:17
On the right, that's the one everybody likes looking at, which is that we built the bridge to build the bridge.
02:37:23
So we finished now, we've touched down onto the marina parking lot over here on the near side.
02:37:29
And you can see the finger piers, those are just, those are temporary.
02:37:33
They're out there just for support so that we can go out there and we will be putting in the finger piers that will support and the piles that will support the future railroads going across the Washington Channel.
02:37:46
Long Bridge South.
02:37:48
So the rail developments on both north and south are underway.
02:37:52
That's making good headway.
02:37:54
The work on the water, we're hoping, is going to be able to really kick off and get running toward the next couple of weeks.
02:38:00
We're going to be working to take out some of the interface pieces for the fender system that's in the river from Obata.
02:38:10
So we'll be tying in our fender system with Ped Ridge and the future rail bridge with the fender system from Obata.
02:38:17
So it's a continuous deflector, if you will, for any boat traffic.
02:38:21
So there's no direct impact to any of the piers.
02:38:24
And then the Haringeyes Bridge, as mentioned on the bottom, that's about 53 miles down the river.
02:38:31
And that's where the material, the large material, steel, structure of steel and big equipment material would be delivered down there instead of bringing it through city streets.
02:38:39
And it will be floated up on barges from down there and then reed, made use of as it reaches this area.
02:38:47
Okay, Mount Vernon Trail, that detour, it was finished in better shape now, it actually is all trimmed out, so it's been well received, very happy, all the folks are.
02:38:58
On the right it's showing some of the work that's been done just to prove out the test, test out the piles that we're proposing here.
02:39:06
The benefit of that is that site that you're looking at is a split second, this isn't a
02:39:16
Okay, so that was an instant impact and it's, you know, the test is proven out well, so our design was proven.
02:39:25
This is down on the left.
02:39:27
This is actually a gravelly point.
02:39:29
If you look in the distance, see the existing Long Bridge up there running across the Potomac River.
02:39:34
This is down a gravelly point so that we can get a lot of material and equipment out onto the water.
02:39:40
So you'll hear people say, we're walking the crane out on the water.
02:39:44
They're doing it on the barge.
02:39:45
It's not like it's walking on the barge.
02:39:48
So that's where we take it out there.
02:39:49
And we that's what it means.
02:39:50
We have to get there with all of the equipment and material, the large material.
02:39:55
You look on the right.
02:39:56
That's very nice bridge, which is all the way down at 301.
02:40:00
It's not far from Fredericksburg, actually.
02:40:03
And it actually is 53 miles.
02:40:05
With my tug, they'll push, you know, push the barge all the way up the river to where they'll be able to make use of the material and put it in at the Long Bridge Project.
02:40:15
These are the abutments for both the north and south side of the river where the bridges will come down and touch down.
02:40:21
On the left is the Virginia side, the south side.
02:40:24
So this is a sheet wall that has been driven along the length of the CSX tracks, which you can see the signal towers and then tracks are just immediately behind them.
02:40:36
All of this area now is the work area to begin putting in the foundation for the abutment A.
02:40:42
And then on Abutment B, which is all the way on the north side of the Potomac Railroad, you can see that the team has put together all of this framework and has driven all of these piles.
02:40:52
Now, each one of those that you see that are stubbed up out of the water, there will be about a 40 or 50 foot extension added to that and the hammer will
02:41:01
So it brings us to where we need it.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
02:41:04
On the right side is what I mentioned earlier, when DJ and I were out there, that's not in the Potomac River.
02:41:09
It just happens to be next to, when you're off next to the river, as soon as you dig down you hit that water table.
02:41:15
So that's when they're doing welding, wearing the moves, wearing the safety equipment, but doing welding while they're standing in water.
02:41:21
It shows you how complicated this project can be.
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
02:41:25
Okay, and then more of the economic river bridge abutment work.
02:41:29
So the logarithm files that are being put in, this is the area where we're working with MLOP and the FAA relative to the length of crane booms in the air.
02:41:38
So we're making sure that we coordinate all of that when we build up.
02:41:42
So all that is very tight coordination with everyone for the FAA.
02:41:46
But this is work that's underway, and it's been going very well.
02:41:52
So with that, Jeff,
SPEAKER_18
02:42:02
Okay, so Alexandria fourth track has been underway since January with CSX in the lead.
02:42:07
This is the project that picks up where Long Bridge leads off and continues the four track arch down six more miles through Arlington County and down to the AF interlocking where tracks split between those that go west, Toronto, the ones that go south into Richmond and beyond.
02:42:24
Like I mentioned, we've been under construction since January.
02:42:26
We have been calculating utilities, like John mentioned.
02:42:29
We've been doing as much as we can
02:42:31
in the interim.
02:42:32
I've been doing a lot of civil work over the last several months to get ready for the track work that's coming.
02:42:38
A lot of retaining walls, a lot of just grading, all those sorts of things.
02:42:42
I'll go through some of the photos, much less landmarks than the ones that John just showed, but no less important.
02:42:49
Working through a lot of different retaining walls to build up the space that we need to support the fourth track.
02:42:54
There's a very utilitarian retaining wall sheet pile that just really, you know,
02:43:01
Support the balance that we need for the track.
02:43:03
We've also been doing a lot of clearing and grubbing in the area.
02:43:06
Again, creating the space that we need to build fourth track.
02:43:09
Getting all the drainage in place.
02:43:11
There is a lot of drainage that has to get done.
02:43:13
New drainage structures, pipes, ditches, whatnot.
02:43:18
Getting put in as much as we can until all the utilities are removed.
02:43:23
Again, there's some more retaining walls.
02:43:25
We've been really focused in the last several months on the northern half of the project, so from the Arwing and Long Canadian and Arlington through Crystal City to about the midpoint of the project, which is Control Point Slaters Lane in Alexandria.
02:43:38
But this is some of the work that's been going on outside Crystal City using a vibratory impact hammer to get those sheet piles to figure out.
02:43:46
These photos show a little bit more of the scale that's going on.
02:43:50
I think it was DJ or Mike that mentioned that this isn't a project where you can see a whole lot of what's going on.
02:43:55
But if you're on a train, you will definitely notice that we're
02:43:57
We've done a lot of clearing, a lot of grading on the right with the subgrade that's going in for the future of Worth Track on the left.
02:44:05
We're starting to spread out sub-ballos.
02:44:07
We've not put any track in yet, but the big focus of the big drive the next months through the end of the year and into next year is going to be getting that fourth track in from Arlington through Alexandria so that we can flip train traffic once the King Commonwealth Bridges, the East Bridges are put in place.
02:44:26
And then this is just from the Long Bridge Aquatic Center Park.
02:44:29
This is looking at the RO interlocking.
02:44:31
This is the first control point that comes off of Long Bridge.
02:44:34
This is going to be really important for the trains that come off of Long Bridge in the future, the four tracks that go into it.
02:44:39
So we've been doing a lot of modifications to the RO interlocking last month.
02:44:43
You see at the bottom in the middle there, we've had to do some demolition of all track and we'll be coming in here and building support track and putting a lot of the special track work, crossovers, and pin signals in this area to cover it.
02:44:56
So staying within this footprint, we have the Alexandria Station improvements, Commonwealth Bridges, and we've mentioned it a few times already, but this is the project that we partnered with VRE to deliver together with one fine tractor, VRE in the lead, their contractor's Cocosin, and we've had a very busy spring and summer.
02:45:15
A lot of great things happening.
02:45:16
So if you mentioned, remember from the last board meeting mentioned that we were focusing on the jump spans.
02:45:22
These were nine temporary bridges that had to get built across the three existing tracks at three of the bridge abutments.
02:45:28
Those create the space to build the new bridges while keeping the existing bridges in service.
02:45:34
And you saw some video of that as well in the video that we just played from one of the jump span outage weekends.
02:45:40
We did a series of three weekends.
02:45:42
They took about four to five days to complete.
02:45:45
They were probably the biggest muscle movement for this project and got them done and really have been in operation now successfully for over a month now, two miles from me.
02:45:56
This was the last weekend at track one, third on June 19th, continued through the June 24th, just walking through the sequence here.
02:46:04
CSX would come out, cut out the segments of track that we needed, we were doing three jump spans at a time and use track.
02:46:11
They would pull out of the segment, the panel of track,
02:46:14
Come in and you can start putting in the piles that support the new jump span bridge.
02:46:20
You see the void they've built up, putting in sheet piles to create again creating space for the excavations that we need to do for the future bridge and then
02:46:29
You see on the right here with the beams that have been put in place, then CSX would come into the track panel and install the existing track panel back into place, weld the rails together, and usually within a few hours of that, we had trains back on.
02:46:47
Obviously, given that it was an Alexandria station, a lot of traffic, a lot going on at that time.
02:46:53
I do want to pause here, too, just to highlight and really give a shout out to BRD for the work they've done for the temporary platform at Alexandria Station.
02:47:02
This is an effort that Dallas spearheaded, Coast and Build did a great job on.
02:47:06
This temporary platform that was installed ahead of this work has really transformed Alexandria Station.
02:47:12
We now have an operational boarding edge at Track One, which means that we now have three boarding edges at Alexandria Station.
02:47:20
If many of you know, before this, Track One was only used in really like emergency situations.
02:47:25
There was one gate, passengers had to walk into Dallas to board trains.
02:47:29
It was really never used.
02:47:31
But now it's being used every day.
02:47:33
And it's a preview of what's to come for when you have to pull out the island platform here and we have multiple boarding edges.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
02:47:41
Jeff, I'm sorry, before you move on.
02:47:44
Dallas, I think you were in the video earlier, the time lapse video.
02:47:47
I shouldn't have.
02:47:50
This is very complicated.
02:47:52
We've been working with Amtrak as well, because they had to make sure that when they're moving people in luggage that they could, they also access track one, two.
02:47:59
Try to put them on track two and three.
02:48:01
So it's been very much coordinated effort.
02:48:03
I think there's been a lot of late nights by some people in the room.
02:48:08
as well to put this all into place.
02:48:10
But it was quite an effort in I think the May timeframe and then moving on forward since then.
02:48:18
But just thank you to Amtrak and VRE for doing the bulk of the work, but CSX also.
02:48:25
CSX people are out there every day.
02:48:27
And as Jeff mentioned, they have to do the tie back in.
02:48:30
CSX and some of their leadership folks from the construction crews have been out there as well.
02:48:35
So it's definitely been a group effort to make sure things are going smoothly at Alexandria Station.
02:48:41
Keep in mind, this is all happening.
02:48:43
At the same time, what we call the Alexandria Shuffle is happening because a lot of trains have to end at Alexandria Station because we don't want them to run through the Long Bridge work window.
02:48:54
So again, another layer of complexity to all of this.
02:48:57
But thank you to everyone and riders, frankly, for working with you.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
02:49:02
And the City of Alexandria.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
02:49:04
And the City of Alexandria.
SPEAKER_13
02:49:05
Jeff, can you go back one slide just really quickly?
02:49:08
I just want to say that this temporary platform has been incredibly successful, as you've noted, and we've added it to our toolkit for projects and stations because it is such good quality.
02:49:19
Most people would not realize that it was temporary, and it's significantly cheaper.
02:49:23
It is fully ADA compliant, so we're really excited to have this in our toolkit for
02:49:30
stations, whether it is, you know, temporary construction mitigation or whether it's something that we start considering for more potentially permanent installations.
SPEAKER_18
02:49:42
Now that the jump spans are in place, as you were mentioning, this creates the space to actually build the foundations for the new bridges while keeping the existing bridges in service.
02:49:52
So we're digging out underneath those spans.
02:49:55
We'll start putting in the deep foundations and the abutments for those bridges.
02:49:59
Obviously, there's a lot more structural support that has to go in there to make sure that it stays in place and that it's safe for those that are working under there.
02:50:05
But that's actually what it would look like if you plucked over there today.
02:50:09
There's a lot of good things happening there.
02:50:11
This is also impacted by utilities at the far end, but I think we have some workarounds.
02:50:15
We have some mitigation strategies that we'll have in place to be able to continue to execute all the way up.
02:50:22
And then just a few more.
02:50:23
There's some helical anchors that go into the sheet miles to support them further.
02:50:28
And I know John showed this earlier.
02:50:29
It's kind of a mess of the utilities that we're still trying to get de-conflicted.
02:50:34
But before I move on, Katie, were there any other comments you want to add?
02:50:41
Okay, Franconia-Springfield bypass and moving into the Franconia corridor.
02:50:46
The bypass has been underway now too.
02:50:48
We've got a lot of good things happening, particularly in the west side of the corridor with our contractor, Flatiron Dragados, Herzog Joint Venture.
02:50:55
This project's probably been impacted the most by the utilities that John mentioned, but we have mitigations that are in place and we're executing them and we're getting as much done as we can.
02:51:09
We have, as Michael showed, we have all the property acquisitions we need.
02:51:13
We have five active access points in place and two long-term railroad crossings going on.
02:51:20
So we actually have really good movement of materials and equipment within the job site.
02:51:24
I think I mentioned before that this is probably the only place in Northern Virginia where you could build a bridge of this size, but it's really hard to get to.
02:51:31
And we've now kind of solved that problem and now we're in there and working these locations, which is great.
02:51:38
I mentioned the west side.
02:51:39
The other thing, given its remoteness, is we have to create the space for the bridge.
02:51:44
On the west side, there's some pretty steep topography, so we've been building walls to make that space for the bridge.
02:51:49
These walls are called soil nail walls.
02:51:50
You saw some in the video as well.
02:51:52
They're unique in the sense that we actually work from the top down.
02:51:56
So you excavate about five to six feet, sheer face down.
02:52:00
You put these soil nails, which are about 30 to 40 feet, steel tendons that go into the ground.
02:52:05
You anchor them and then you lock it off with this special kind of sprayable concrete called shotcrete that ends up being the permanent face of the wall and we just keep going down.
02:52:15
So some of these walls are going to be as much as 35 feet tall.
02:52:19
They went down in many segments, but this, like I said, gives us the space to actually build the bridge that we need.
02:52:26
We showed it also in the video that we're getting ready to start building the permanent foundations for the bypass.
02:52:32
These were the test shafts, were kind of the proof of concept shafts that we've done.
02:52:37
We've done three of these that proved out.
02:52:38
We now have a planned fork and we're going to start actually installing our first pull shafts next weekend.
02:52:43
We have 150 to go, so no time like now to get started.
02:52:48
Also doing drainage whenever we can.
02:52:50
And the other good thing is we've had the steel for the bridge has actually been fabricated for the last few months.
02:52:56
It's going to continue into next spring.
02:52:59
I think it's more than 600 pieces of steel for the bridge.
02:53:02
So there's a there's a lot that's happening off site as well.
02:53:06
I mentioned the third track earlier.
02:53:08
Well, it's not fully under construction yet.
02:53:11
We have been doing some early work as well as utility relocations in the area.
02:53:16
You mentioned that we're taking on some of the Fairfax County sanitary sewer work.
02:53:20
So that's going on.
02:53:21
I mentioned before, too, that we had an early works package to relocate the control point.
02:53:27
It used to be called the Ravensworth interlocking or CP Ravensworth.
02:53:31
There were some crossovers and signals that directly conflicted with the bypass structure.
02:53:36
So we moved those north of the Frank County Springfield Station to just south of the Beltway, our 495, which is what we call our CSX standard CP Beltway.
02:53:46
It's been in operation since late June, and then we went and retired CP Ravensworth by what we call straight railing, which is taking out all the crossovers
02:53:56
and Special Trackwork, and now C.P.
02:53:58
Ribbonsworth is a thing of history.
02:54:01
So with that, we can also look at some of the tricklery that we've been doing for the sewer.
02:54:06
And one of our wins, actually, I know John mentioned Moomin a lot, was getting Moomin to actually abandon the multi-story underground structure near Newington Road that had been in place.
02:54:17
So it's been good to see some progress on that front as well.
02:54:21
So with that, I know that I end up easy going.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
02:54:27
Ralph Pickney couldn't be here with us today.
02:54:29
He's helped brief us on New River Valley.
02:54:32
But we'll tell you, I haven't been down in New River Valley with Colin.
02:54:36
I think they're trying to get him to move down there.
02:54:37
They like him so much.
02:54:39
Colin's on our planning team, but he's been involved in New River Valley for what, four plus years now?
02:54:44
Early 2022.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
02:54:45
I'm going to move to Alexandra first.
SPEAKER_04
02:54:49
Madam Chair, members of the board, thank you very much.
02:54:53
My name is Colin Burch.
02:54:54
As Mike said, I'm working on the NRB project.
02:54:57
I'm the sixth standing passenger from Roanoke to the Cambriair, Preciousburg, about 30 miles away.
02:55:02
I also constructed a layer facility in Brantford, which is another nine miles west of Preciousburg.
02:55:07
I won't spend a ton of time on this slide because there's a lot of work going on that's been completed and upcoming, but two things I want to point out is that good news, we're on pace to have the completion and extension of service in 2037 and with the passenger platform, the concrete flooring is just over 70% of the total.
02:55:24
For reference, the last board meeting is around 30%.
02:55:30
In these next few pictures I can kind of cover what was discussed in that busier slide before, but the picture on the left shows the concrete port for the platform and you get a good idea of how tight the platform went into the building.
02:55:41
You can kind of see the building there off in the background.
02:55:44
And then also I should say that both of these images are looking west, or sorry east, so Roanoke is that way.
02:55:51
And then the picture on the right, you can see the overhanging of the station building into the molding for the concrete
02:55:59
very tight next to the station building, so it's a really complex site.
02:56:05
Another good picture.
02:56:06
This one has, you can kind of see it in the background, it's an Norfolk Southern truck actually driving by.
02:56:10
So let's just remind you that this is an active 24-hour rail mainline and an active, nearly 24-hour construction site.
02:56:18
This was taken at about four o'clock in the morning.
02:56:20
In the summer months of the heat, the crews are starting earlier and earlier, but we are making sure that the lighting that they're used is not shining into people's backyards or windows because they are houses that are about 200 feet away.
02:56:30
That's the concrete truck that's pouring for the platform.
02:56:36
This slide is now looking west, so Redford is that way.
02:56:42
And you can see the station building here in the foreground and then the skeleton for the platform that's being poured.
02:56:47
And you can see some of the slabs that are being put on top.
02:56:50
That's going to be kind of next step.
02:56:52
And you can also get an idea of where the Paxton track will be.
02:56:58
Where the Paxton track will be immediately adjacent to the two main line tracks.
02:57:03
And you can kind of see the very top right of that picture just beyond the signal
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
02:57:10
This is an example of what I talked about before though with the pocket track where when the passenger train is off of the main line you can have a high level platform so there are no stairs because you don't have freight trains going right next to the station.
SPEAKER_04
02:57:32
This is a view of a parking lot with the station building kind of in the background.
02:57:35
This is looking west towards Radford.
02:57:38
You can see that where this
02:57:42
That's where the parking lot will be.
02:57:44
It's going to be about 150 spaces that extend from there all the way down to the station building itself.
02:57:49
And then this lane next to it on the other side of the median is actually the transit drop-off lane.
02:57:53
So they'll be the dedicated lane for buses and cars that are dropping people off where they can thump them off in front of the building or on the other side will be three bus bays.
02:58:07
And now moving a little further west to Redford.
02:58:09
This is looking west, further away from Redford.
02:58:12
So that way is further southwest of Virginia.
02:58:16
And onto the right, you have the Cup Memorial Field, Redford University Athletic Complex.
02:58:21
To the left of the image would be downtown Redford and kind of main campus.
02:58:25
You can see that the light bulbs have been installed and kind of see the security fencing starting to go up.
02:58:30
The track's been laid and the ballast has been poured.
02:58:33
And you can also see some of the, on the right there, some of the equipment
02:58:37
The appurtenances for the Amtrak Modular Building on statics installed.
02:58:43
And that's also if you look in the background, it's University Boulevard, which connects the athletic complex to downtown and university.
02:58:52
This is a closer view of the foundations for the modular building, which will be coming
02:58:56
That's one of the next steps.
02:58:58
That's where the Amtrak crews will service the train overnight, cleaning in all the routine maintenance items.
02:59:05
And then there will also be electrical equipment used as part of the maintenance and the water cabin.
02:59:14
Last slide.
02:59:14
This is just, this is kind of the end of the line of that route.
02:59:18
It's literally the end of the line.
02:59:21
So you have the Redford University athletic complex over here, downtown, and Redford over on this side, looking towards Christianburg and Cambria, and you can see the life points that have been installed, the bumper posts, and then this laying off to the left will be paved, and that will allow Amtrak crews to access that modular building, which will be up near where that port line is.
02:59:43
That's all.
02:59:44
Are there any questions?
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
02:59:54
I can't help but notice with the New River Valley
03:00:03
It's really exciting to see all that progress happening.
03:00:07
I don't know if folks how much you're tracking major construction happening on I-81 and so I think we will see once this opens again like there we already have a strong market there but I think it will continue as folks are looking for
03:00:24
options over the next few years and hopefully they'll stay with us because they'll find out it's so great to ride by rail but I think this the passenger rail improvements become really important during that construction period and beyond so I know that's a major VDOT project that will be many years underway but already a lot of
03:00:44
A lot of construction pain that they're feeling on Interstate 81.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
03:00:47
And we're looking forward to having this open in 2027.
03:00:51
Remember Amtrak runs seven days a week for those who want to take the train to a Virginia Tech football game, which is about five miles north of the station, and there will be transit opportunities there.
03:01:02
It'll be a great opportunity to take the train to a football game.
SPEAKER_05
03:01:07
With that, I think we're handing over to Jeremy next.
Michael McLaughlin
Chief Operating Officer
03:01:11
Is that correct?
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
03:01:12
Oh, I should check my, I was so enamored by the construction update.
03:01:19
Yes, we will now go to hear from Mr. Latimer on the service performance updates.
Jeremy Latimer
Director of Rail Services
03:01:31
So as we go through the service performance, all the construction you've seen, the trains, so we're going to talk about how that's going.
03:01:39
And I'm going to start with Virginia Railway Express.
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
03:01:42
So please chime in, Katie.
Jeremy Latimer
Director of Rail Services
03:01:45
But just to kind of orient you with the geographic routes for BRE, we're looking at the Manassas Line there, we put that in blue, and the Fredericksburg Line in red.
03:01:53
8 Daily Ground Trips is the regular
03:01:56
VRE on each of those lines.
03:01:59
And so what I'm going to point out is a slide with a lot of information on it, so we'll walk through it together, but if you look at the chart on the left, we'll start there.
03:02:07
So the blue is the Manassas line delays, the red is the Fredericksburg line delays, and you can see an inverse relationship
03:02:14
The on-time performance of an on-time performance is higher, the delays are lower.
03:02:19
You can see in July of 2025, a year ago, we were doing better than we are currently at 63.7%, which is not a great report card for BRE.
03:02:30
I will also note that there is a trend down since we have implemented the Long Bridge work windows in March fully.
03:02:38
So we started them in January and then fully implemented them in March.
03:02:42
So we were working with VRE on that.
03:02:45
Is there anything you'd like to say?
SPEAKER_13
03:02:47
Yeah, there's so much congestion outside of the work window that anytime anything goes wrong with any train or any piece of infrastructure, those cascading delays for the entire system just impact everything.
03:03:04
And that's really what we are seeing.
03:03:06
and so we're we're looking at the with VPRA very collaboratively looking at the causes of delays and where it's something any of us have control over we're looking to mitigate it but I do anticipate that our on-time performance will remain lower than our target for the foreseeable future because I think some of it is just
03:03:33
going to be the case.
03:03:34
I will say that on the days things go well, we're at 90% or better for on-time performance.
03:03:40
There's just not very many of those days right now.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
03:03:42
It's much harder to recover, to your point.
03:03:44
It is.
03:03:44
It's kind of like I said earlier, I've got eight hours to go over in five minutes.
03:03:49
You've got a whole day for the train to go through in only what used to be 12 hours.
SPEAKER_13
03:03:54
And I will note, too, just because it is a difference that we don't talk about very often.
03:03:59
Amtrak considers a train late after 15 minutes.
03:04:02
We measure our performance after five minutes.
03:04:05
So there is you know, this is this is based on any delay that six minutes or over is reflected on this.
Jeremy Latimer
Director of Rail Services
03:04:12
And so I'll say after that would be the eight.
03:04:16
So how late on average on the Manassas line where the southbound trains tend to be worse
03:04:33
The progress for the line is actually northbound, southbound is pink.
03:04:39
So with the six minutes, you do about 14, 15 minutes on average, like trains.
03:04:46
And most of the afternoon trains are the worst performers.
03:04:50
That's where the congestion builds for the day.
03:04:51
Same thing with the airlines.
03:04:52
As the day goes on, more things get off schedule.
03:04:55
And what I'll point out is 325 there at the very end.
03:04:58
If you look on the right-hand side, we have the trains kind of ranked by their on-time performance.
03:05:02
325 is the mid-date for the VRA runs.
03:05:05
It comes out of Washington.
03:05:06
We know that's one of those ones that's in our control there.
03:05:10
Not necessarily easy to fix, but we're aware that the RONA brickbound train and that 325 mid-day train are supposed to be deferred.
03:05:19
It's a single-edged platform.
03:05:21
We've got a solution we thought we'd probably sell, and they're going to put in a routing solution while we work on some scheduled solutions.
03:05:26
So we are getting very granular in how we're trying to fix trains.
03:05:30
Looking at Amtrak service.
03:05:32
So starting with kind of a big picture overview.
03:05:36
So state supported services, Navy Blue, that's the Amtrak Virginia service.
03:05:40
The Orange is the long distance service.
03:05:44
And then you see the Carolinian service, that's the North Carolina service.
03:05:48
And then we also have the dotted line where we have now implemented inner city buses with the implementation of the Long Bridge work window to replace some of our trains that scale back to service.
03:06:01
Our Northeast Regionals have further to travel, and the further you have to travel, the more chances for things to get off schedule.
03:06:07
So generally, we see lower on-time clearance than we do for VRE, and that is the case here.
03:06:12
Year over year, we're actually slightly better, but there are less trains out there.
03:06:16
So that's why you see 13,000 trains.
03:06:22
If you look on the right-hand side there again how we ranked the trains by on-time performance level, it is actually our weekend trains where you have fewer runs that are the worst performers and most of the worst performing trains are actually southbound trains.
03:06:37
Again, same trend with Amtrak, afternoon congestion, worse trains are the afternoon southbounds.
03:06:45
Long distance trains, those ones that were in Orange, even further to travel.
03:06:49
Ones that are coming up from the south into Virginia are often coming in late.
03:06:53
They hold steady as they travel north to the Northeast Corridor.
03:06:56
However, the southbound coming off of the Northeast Corridor actually tend to lose performance in Virginia.
03:07:02
Again, the congestion being the main story there and you can see we are slightly down.
03:07:07
This is seasonal because things get tougher in the suburbs and talks about that.
03:07:12
But if you look on the right-hand side, as we've talked about, the distance train, so 79 is the North Carolina train, that's one of the better performers.
03:07:19
89 goes to Savannah, and that one is first out of the gate, and we've seen that get a lot of freight train interference.
03:07:27
Now, if you look all the way to the right, the Floridian's just a challenge train.
03:07:32
It's never me.
03:07:35
He goes from Chicago to Florida, has a very long route and it just comes in to Virginia and things don't go well in Virginia.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
03:07:44
That was over seven different post railroads.
Jeremy Latimer
Director of Rail Services
03:07:46
Yes.
03:07:47
Yes.
03:07:47
Very challenging route.
03:07:51
But I'm going to delve deeper into some of the service issues that we're tracking.
03:07:55
So I'm going to talk about summer schedule.
03:07:58
to put in some cushion in the summertime.
03:08:00
We're working with the ongoing construction that you've been seeing all afternoon.
03:08:04
Talk specifically about the Long Bridge work window and also, as you've probably seen in October 16th, interlocking at Washington Union Station.
03:08:14
So one of the things that we do is we track heat order delays.
03:08:17
So heat orders, every railroad has to have a heat order policy.
03:08:20
Every railroad has a different heat order policy.
03:08:23
We're just looking at CSX Richmond to Washington DC here.
03:08:26
So if CSX, their policy says if it gets above 85 degrees or if there's a 30 degree temperature swing,
03:08:33
More if ambient temperatures around the rail are sufficient, they can call a heat order that day.
03:08:37
For CSX, that means from 1pm to 7pm, all trains slow down.
03:08:42
That means our schedule isn't going to work, 1 to 7pm, any day they say it.
03:08:47
You can see from April until August, there's a high risk of that, especially in June and July.
03:08:52
Where it gets complicated is you look at June, you can see that the first year we started tracking this in 23 was 4,000, the next year it was almost double, but then it's come back down.
03:09:01
And so we're trying to predict something based on past data, but we don't know how it's going to shake out because it's not always throughout the entire month.
03:09:10
Sometimes it's like in July this past year, it was all around July 4th, right?
03:09:15
And so if we put too much cushion in the schedule, then the rest of the month, the trains were running slower than they need to and they're dwelling.
03:09:22
So I'm not going to spend much more time on that other than we've added five to fifteen minutes of train and we monitor this every year.
03:09:28
That's why the schedules change in summer.
03:09:32
We are also tracking all this construction that you see in the pictures.
03:09:37
And it kind of, everything is like the headphones next to the neck bone, like saying, everything's connected.
03:09:42
And I'm going to talk a little bit about how that will play out for us on service.
03:09:46
So we know there are some projects like our VPRA projects that we've been tracking, they've completed some things and not a lot of impact for where they are in their construction right now.
03:09:55
So, but we track things.
03:09:56
We want to know if it's going to have an impact.
03:09:59
CSX has to do maintenance-of-way work every year.
03:10:02
We try to talk to them in December about what that looks like every year.
03:10:05
We even ask this past year to say, please don't do it in the summertime when we have heat orders.
03:10:09
Can you move it to the shoulder seasons?
03:10:11
They were able to do that this year.
03:10:12
So most of the work happened in May and April, wrapped up in early June.
03:10:16
And it's been quiet out there ever since, which is helping us.
03:10:19
So even though we have a lot of other challenges introduced.
03:10:23
And then we have certain projects that I'm going into a little deeper where VRE had their King and Commonwealth Bridges in May were very active in how they affect passengers and there was a lot of coordination and I'll talk more about that.
03:10:36
But you can see how it all stacks together, right?
03:10:39
And it's also that like CSX is doing their work at night to try and stay out with passenger trains, but that means their freight trains aren't running at night.
03:10:45
So that pushes the freight trains into the daytime.
03:10:50
So everything's connected.
03:10:52
We're just trying our best to coordinate.
03:10:57
So this is an example of the King and Commonwealth bridges and how it affects Alexandria Station, how it's trying to coordinate.
03:11:03
So this is largely the desktop exercise that leads us out to go out on site and work with all the operators.
03:11:08
So what you see here is track three, which is next to the station, has the red on it.
03:11:13
And the track two in the middle there is the other one that you would usually board off of at Alexandria.
03:11:19
This was one of the seven phases.
03:11:21
This was over a weekend when those tracks were coming out of service.
03:11:25
So the normal tracks that you would board on are coming out of service over that weekend.
03:11:29
So we find out from the construction side what's the impact going to be.
03:11:33
We have track three, track two out of service.
03:11:34
We have other construction going on.
03:11:35
We're trying to make sure we know what's worried about that weekend.
03:11:39
And we kind of broke it down into a customer impacts dictionary.
03:11:42
So should we be worrying about travel time, dwell time, train interference, passenger impact, operators coordination.
03:11:49
And so then what we've done is kind of summarize where we think those those pain points are going to be.
03:11:53
And we go out on site, we talk to the construction guys, make sure that we have everything right.
03:11:58
We know that
03:12:00
When you're getting off on that temporary platform at Alexandria, you have to spot the trainings.
03:12:04
So you're now not opening two doors on each end, right?
03:12:07
You're opening one door in the middle, which means if you have an 88 passenger, you have a bottleneck where it's going to take a lot longer.
03:12:13
That dwell time is going to increase.
03:12:15
And also because of the construction, those passengers now have to go downstairs.
03:12:19
underneath the tunnel up the stairs all the way around the station and avoid all the construction like the passenger pathway to your train is also completely different so there's just a lot to think about how somebody with a lot of luggage or kids or whatever you're trying to maneuver to get out the train how this is what this looks like to them.
03:12:37
And we continue to do that as construction comes online.
03:12:40
So there's just a lot to think about.
03:12:42
Each project will have a different impact.
03:12:45
Some of them might be slower.
03:12:47
Some of them might be nothing.
03:12:48
Some of them might be very impactful at stations.
03:12:50
And so we are working to try and follow that as we go through the program.
03:12:55
I'm going to talk a little bit about Long Bridge and if you've been paying attention, that is an old picture because all those streets are still there.
03:13:01
So I will get an updated picture next time and talk about Long Bridge.
03:13:04
But the idea is we're looking south towards Arlington and the reason for the Long Bridge work window is primarily due to Long Bridge norm because that is the most constrained urban area where they need that time to track file and we have to hold back the trains.
03:13:21
As we were working through that, this is just a reminder, some of you have seen this before, the Long Bridge work window is affecting service east of the Mississippi River.
03:13:29
So we have trains that go from Chicago to Florida, New Orleans to Boston.
03:13:33
And so we were
03:13:37
It's a very difficult thing to maneuver and not create conflicts in trains traveling further south to like Savannah where crews would time out if we were pushing the Palmetto too late to arrive in Savannah.
03:13:54
So this is where we looked at at the end of last year.
03:13:57
You can see the parade of the blue and the red trains, the VRE morning northbound.
03:14:03
You see them in the afternoon and you can see our Amtrak regionals in the navy blue and you see purple as long distance in the Carolinian where we're more spaced out.
03:14:13
And you can see there's the morning rush and the afternoon rush.
03:14:16
And the afternoon is where we knew there's the most congestion.
03:14:18
So we were trying to decide where to put the work window.
03:14:20
We knew there had to be some sort of cushion in the afternoon.
03:14:24
So what we ended up with is at 815, the Long Bridge work window starts.
03:14:30
We have VRE trains that come up to Alexandria and let people off Alexandria as they go to the Metro, and then they go back to Seminary Yard.
03:14:38
And then we have some of our Amtrak trains that are now buses.
03:14:42
And then in the afternoon, you have that Alexandria shuffle where a few of the VRE trains coming out of D.C. will stop at Alexandria.
03:14:49
The train comes up from Seminary Yard and they shuffle.
03:14:53
So that's kind of the steady state we're in right now.
03:14:57
We have other projects up the Northeast corridor.
03:15:00
So all this IIJ funding is coming online and all these projects that were needed are coming online all at once.
03:15:04
So we're coordinating with Amtrak and trying to determine when a project in Northeast would affect Virginia service.
03:15:12
There have already been some impacts that were minor.
03:15:14
So we've gone, we call it Saturday, Sunday schedule when we need to, but there is a larger impact that we've known is on the horizon and it's getting here
03:15:22
Very soon.
03:15:22
And so in January, we first started talking with Amtrak about the interlocking of Washington Union Station.
03:15:32
And we were originally there was plans to do that work as early as the spring of this past year.
03:15:38
BRE and Amtrak and BPRA decided it's too soon.
03:15:42
We're not ready.
03:15:43
We need time.
03:15:44
The Portal North Bridge up in New Jersey has a cut-over coming.
03:15:47
We can coordinate with that.
03:15:48
That gives us more time for the Long Bridge team to also look and see if they can take advantage of it.
03:15:52
If any of our TRV projects can take advantage of this, we're going to cut back service drastically.
03:15:57
So we wanted to have coordination of the East Coast if we could.
03:16:01
And that is, if you've seen the news, called Pause for Progress.
03:16:05
So the Portal North Bridge, that's operational.
03:16:08
The cut-over is coming in October.
03:16:09
And at the same time, Amtrak has been doing rehabilitation project at Washington Union Station.
03:16:14
If you were to go further, you would see all of these tracks spanning out to the yard, right?
03:16:18
So they've been working their way down, rehabilitating switches.
03:16:21
In October, they will get to the A interlocking, which is the entrance to the First Street Tunnel, which is the way that trains, passenger trains come into Virginia.
03:16:29
So that will be
03:16:31
Cut off for nine days starting October 16th.
03:16:35
So October 16th, service will ramp down and we will position trains to be cut off in Northeast Florida for nine days.
03:16:42
And I'll talk about those service changes in a second.
03:16:45
On October 26th, everything will go smoothly and we'll open back up on October 26th.
03:16:50
and resume normal service.
SPEAKER_13
03:16:52
Can I correct that slide?
03:16:53
Can you go back?
03:16:55
It's not that passenger trains will not operate.
03:16:56
It is that Amtrak trains will not operate between Union Station and Virginia because VRE will be running to L'Enfant, reduced schedule to L'Enfant.
03:17:05
So we will be running into D.C. from Virginia.
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
03:17:11
Are you going to tell us, Jeremy, how you're going to take great advantage of this and just knock out big things on Long Bridge during those nine days?
Jeremy Latimer
Director of Rail Services
03:17:19
If Longbridge would like to speak to that, I do know there are different plans to take that.
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
03:17:24
Yes, we're coordinating with the contractors, both North and South contractors, to recognize this window, that there's a benefit here.
03:17:31
And so more dramatic, large work, if it can be coordinated to be done during that period of time, that is what they're targeting.
03:17:40
But a lot of that
03:17:43
type of work is in a progression with other work that has to take place so it can't always take a full advantage where we absolutely just do a devastating of the area and then come back and we have it all back in place.
03:17:56
As was stated trains will be going through this area so we will still have traffic it just won't be as heavy and we're going to take advantage of that with every chance we get.
DJ Stadtler
Executive Director
03:18:05
So in addition to VRE, you also have the CSX trains that don't go through the First Street Tunnel, they go through the Virginia Avenue Tunnel.
03:18:12
So they pass Lafont and then they keep going.
03:18:14
So CSX is looking at this like, oh, look, we can run our trains like normal.
03:18:17
And we're stepping back saying, no, we still have work to do.
Jeremy Latimer
Director of Rail Services
03:18:21
And it'll be the weekends when no VRE service, no Amtrak service.
03:18:25
There's going to be a request for CSX and a Track 2 outage.
03:18:29
A lot of things works for that.
03:18:33
So again, you've seen this slide, but this is our steady state.
03:18:37
So we have our two daily run trips from Roanoke, from Norfolk, from Newport News and our inner city buses.
03:18:44
And so when we enter into the nine days,
03:18:49
We will reduce our service significantly.
03:18:51
So, what we're going to have is push-pull service.
03:18:54
So, this is in Amtrak equipment south of Washington.
03:18:58
There will be a locomotive, so a double-ended train.
03:19:02
We'll start at Roto, we'll start in Raleigh, we'll start at Norfolk.
03:19:05
Let's just use the Roanoke example.
03:19:07
That push-pull train will go up to Alexandria, it will dwell for about 45 minutes, get clean, you have deliveries, whatever needs to happen in Alexandria, and then that train will then go down to Raleigh or north, and we'll keep cycling those train sets through.
03:19:20
This is actually North Carolina's idea.
03:19:22
We were at the time just looking to preserve Virginia service, and they said, can we share equipment and make this happen?
03:19:27
So we collectively went and pitched that Amtrak.
03:19:29
We've been able to work that out.
03:19:32
And so during this time, Amtrak is going to stage some additional engines at Lordland.
03:19:37
We can make sure we have spares if something were to go wrong.
03:19:40
And VRE, a little block there, but VRE will make use of that seminary yard, which I point out because that's just one of the, the Manassas Line purchasing seminary yard has paid benefits.
03:19:53
Just, I mean, it's paid for itself in these first couple of years.
03:19:55
I mean, it's just incredible the amount of need we've been able to utilize seminary yard to keep service going.
03:20:02
So that is the plan.
03:20:04
So there's going to be a lot of buses.
03:20:06
So Amtrak landing page, in addition to us having buses, is going to include that you can utilize the metro when you get off.
03:20:13
Also the Virginia Breeze bus service has some routes that can get you to Washington, DC.
03:20:17
and also at all various different markets like the Dulles.
03:20:20
But then we will also be implementing the light blue dotted lines, additional bus service.
03:20:24
So we have Amtrak connection services, the bus service.
03:20:28
It's currently four round trips right now from Richmond.
03:20:31
We're going to 11 round trips during this time.
03:20:34
And so we're working out
03:20:36
Utilization of bus slips up in Washington, D.C. to make sure that all works.
03:20:40
And then also we have to get parking space at Alexandria Station.
03:20:43
The construction crews are using some of those spaces.
03:20:45
So we're just a lot of coordination is going on.
03:20:52
So for the VRE service, I just want to make sure we also show how that's going to be affected.
03:20:56
So right now you have service, the daily round trips on each line, going up to Washington Union Station.
03:21:01
When we have the shuffle or sorry, the morning service that terminates Alexandria, you have the King Street Metro Station that VRE passengers are also using.
03:21:11
And then southbound, you have the Alexandria Shuffle in the afternoon.
03:21:14
So that's kind of the steady state normal service right now.
03:21:18
And then that will be cut back to four
03:21:21
Ron Trix on the Manassas Line, five on the Fredericksburg Line, still honoring the Long Bridge work window during that time.
03:21:29
So you have terminations at Alexandria and then the south bounds will still have the Alexandria shuffle in the afternoon.
03:21:34
So just produce service that goes to Lafont and then there's metro access at Lafont as well.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
03:21:42
And if I could just note for folks, so I know DJ and I are starting to get inquiries about this because it is starting to hit the news more.
03:21:51
I'm sure Katie is getting a lot of inquiries, Jennifer, I know Amtrak is, but feel free if you
03:21:58
Get questions, let us know or if it would be helpful I'm sure we could provide some you know just kind of bullet points for folks if you are getting questions in your community.
03:22:06
I think what's important is like the team has been coordinating very closely as you heard with a lot of different partners in anticipation of this.
03:22:14
We are looking at ways to take advantage
03:22:17
for the Long Bridge construction.
03:22:19
But yes, service is impacted, but we are really trying to provide some supplemental service through the bus that you're all supporting, that DRPT through the Virginia breeze of having some of this push-pull Amtrak service.
03:22:33
And Katie, your point on VRE is still running.
03:22:36
I think is an important one but I think we can really use everyone's help as you know you get questions or concerns in your community you know folks will feel the pinch if you're trying to travel during that time but we are you know trying to do everything we can and look at all of our tools to be able to support folks but I don't know if you or Adele as I saw here.
Jeremy Latimer
Director of Rail Services
03:22:54
I just wanted to add something to Jeremy's diagram if you will that is very unique about this and perhaps educational about going forward after the coordinator.
03:23:03
is that there's a non-revenue move from Lafont back to Alexandria.
SPEAKER_05
03:23:09
Every one of those trains has to come back to Alexandria to store because we have nowhere else to store.
03:23:14
We can't go to IBC.
03:23:16
Double every blue line, double every red line in the north of Alexandria.
Jeremy Latimer
Director of Rail Services
03:23:20
This has been part of the negotiation with the CSX is the number of deadhead moves that have to go through Alexandria.
03:23:26
Yeah, there's a lot of congestion in the area.
SPEAKER_13
03:23:30
I think that's actually an important point for this.
03:23:32
As much as we focus on what happens in these 10 days, this A interlocking work is going to have an incredible positive impact on our reliability, both Amtrak's and VRE's reliability, because this is an area that we slow down to get into the tunnel every single trip that we make in and out of Union Station.
03:23:49
And so it's really like we will see benefits from this.
03:23:53
So it's a bit of pain getting through it, but it is going to start helping our performance.
Jeremy Latimer
Director of Rail Services
03:23:59
And so for the Amtrak service, so that some of us has already booked our our trips to be riding during that week.
03:24:06
And so we have already been notified by Amtrak, just we want to see how this all plays out.
03:24:09
So we've gotten the texts about your trip is being rebuilt.
03:24:13
You know, we were monitoring how many people had already booked and working with Amtrak to try and capture as much of that business as we could.
03:24:23
I want to go back real quick.
03:24:25
You see the dotted blue lines between the train lines, so we will have bus bridges in Alexandria.
03:24:30
Those will be timed to meet the trains in Alexandria.
03:24:33
I can get you to a Washington Union station, two Washington Union stations so that you can take a connecting train further north.
03:24:40
So we will have those buses in place as well.
03:24:47
So wrapping this up, in addition to us kind of watching how their projects are evolving, what impacts they should have on service, just some high level milestones, just so you can see that this isn't all haphazard.
03:24:58
We are looking at the future and know what's on the horizon in some cases.
03:25:02
And so Paws for Progress is the big one that we've been planning for about a year now.
03:25:07
And after Paws for Progress, November 1st is when Long Bridge Work Window is suspended.
03:25:13
And that is CSX.
03:25:18
because their intermodal traffic picks up at that time.
03:25:21
And so we are looking to take advantage of that by adding back or restoring some of the times for our trains to hopefully have better service options during the holiday months.
03:25:32
And then early January, so in that time between November and January, we're working on what our version 2.0 is.
03:25:40
to point out going into next year.
03:25:42
And then we have summer schedules start on Memorial Day, they end again on Labor Day, and then the second half of 2027, New River Valley Service Extension.
03:25:49
So there's just a lot on the horizon for service planning.
03:25:53
And just going to end it here and take questions, but just showing that here we have the King Commonwealth Bridges under construction.
03:26:03
I'd just like to add, I really want to compliment the Amtrak and
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
03:26:23
the BRE staff that man the Alexandria Station.
03:26:26
What Jeremy said about people having to do the shuffle that get off these trains, whether it's Amtrak or whether it's BRE, they do have a lot of baggage.
03:26:34
There are people that are really in need.
03:26:36
And these gentlemen and ladies have set up both squads to really help with that.
03:26:41
And it's been appreciated not just by the people that they're doing it for, but others that actually witnessed that.
03:26:46
So I really applaud the fact that this is something that everybody has really taken very seriously and they're doing a really good job of it.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
03:26:58
Thank you, team.
03:27:00
Good luck.
03:27:03
Surely somewhere there must be some, you know, app or something where one could play and pretend you're all those variables.
03:27:13
Well, we are next going to discuss something that we need to go into closed session for.
03:27:19
And so I want to see if we have a mention to go into closed session to discuss the executive director's annual performance review.
SPEAKER_19
03:27:27
I move that the committee convene in a closed session pursuant to section 2.2-3711A1 of the Code of Education for the purpose of discussing the jobs of specific public officers or employees of the VPRA and that the VPRA chief administrative officer and the general counsel attend the closed session because their presence is deemed necessary will aid the committee in the consideration of these matters.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
03:27:54
Can I get a second?
03:27:56
All in favor say aye.
03:27:59
So say nay.
03:28:01
Any abstentions?
SPEAKER_00
03:28:02
All right, so we will make sure we are on.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
04:03:03
No, we don't have to have a motion to reconvene.
04:03:06
We just have to do a roll vote that we should, that we didn't say about anything that we shouldn't have said yet.
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
04:03:12
So are we live now?
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
04:03:17
Alrighty.
04:03:19
We are now going to take a roll call vote, and I ask that each member indicate their agreement with the following.
04:03:25
To the best of my knowledge, during the closed meeting, the only matters heard, discussed, or considered were those matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.
04:03:37
and only those public business matters as were identified in the motion by which the meeting was convened.
04:03:43
So we will now do a roll call vote.
SPEAKER_12
04:03:46
Mr. Crawford, Mr. Delandro, Ms. George, Mr.
04:03:52
Flowers, Mr. Jordan.
SPEAKER_18
04:03:55
Yes.
SPEAKER_12
04:03:56
Ms. Lawrence.
04:03:58
Aye.
04:03:59
Ms. Prater.
Patricia Doersch
Member, Board of Directors
04:04:00
Aye.
SPEAKER_12
04:04:00
Ms. Rhinehart.
04:04:03
Aye.
04:04:05
Mr. Sharad.
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
04:04:07
Agreed.
SPEAKER_12
04:04:07
Spears, Mr. Watkins.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
04:04:12
Alrighty, now we will take action regarding the Executive Director performance year ejectional rating and salary adjustment.
04:04:25
So we want to see if we have a motion to approve the performance rating and the salary adjustment that was discussed.
04:04:32
Do I need to say what?
Darien Flowers
Member, Board of Directors
04:04:34
Yeah.
SPEAKER_11
04:04:34
Okay, so we will
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
04:04:36
We will vote to approve an Exceptional Performance Year Ejectable Rating with a 4.5% salary adjustment.
04:04:45
So if we could get a motion to approve that.
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
04:04:48
So moved.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
04:04:49
Second?
04:04:50
Second.
04:04:51
All in favor say aye.
Charlie Payne
Member, Board of Directors
04:04:53
Aye.
04:04:54
Opposed say nay.
Mariia Zimmerman
Chair, Board of Directors
04:04:55
Opps sorry.
04:04:58
Sorry, sorry.
04:04:58
Two ayes there.
04:05:02
Any opposed say nay.
04:05:05
Any abstentions?
04:05:08
You guys have it.
04:05:10
All righty.
04:05:12
Sorry for my clunky chair duties there.
04:05:14
That's my first time kind of coming in and out of that.
04:05:18
So we are going to wrap up and adjourn.
04:05:22
But one thing I wanted to mention, I don't know if we have a slide.
04:05:26
There we go.
04:05:27
I was hoping there was a slide in there.
04:05:29
So our next meeting is November 18th, and we're very excited.
04:05:34
We're going to be doing it in Alexandria at the VPRA.
04:05:38
Excuse me, the meeting is on the 19th.
04:05:39
The board meeting is on the 19th, but on the 18th, for those of you who are able,
04:05:44
We invite you to join us in the afternoon for a tour to see all the work that's underway up there that we've been hearing about.
04:05:52
And then we'll also have dinner together that night in Alexandria.
04:05:56
So Mary Estelle will be following up so we can get a head count for all of that.
04:06:00
And then we'll have the board meeting the next day at VPRA's office is there by the King Street Metro.
04:06:07
and then we wanted to give you a preview for the dates for 2027 so hopefully these don't change but this is barring any
04:06:20
You know, any unforeseen issues.
04:06:24
We're looking to continue having our board meetings on Thursdays, January 21st, May 20th, August 26th, and November 18th.
04:06:31
And DJ and I have also been talking about maybe one of those meetings could happen out in the New River Valley, since we'll have some exciting things opening up there.
04:06:43
Tech weekend.
04:06:48
So I think that's everything we needed to talk about today, but thank you everybody for your time.
04:06:56
Thank you so much to the staff who helped to not only prepare for this meeting, but just do exceptional work every day.
04:07:03
And thank you to all of our other partners.
04:07:06
So thank you.
04:07:06
And with that, the meeting is adjourned.