Terminating NEC at Dulles

Has this option ever been studied?

No, that's nuts/pointless.

FRN9 wrote:Has this option ever been studied?

Why?

The NEC has stations at Newark and BWI and in Europe rail stations (CDG, GVA, AMS etc) often have connections to high speed intercity rail connections. An NEC connection would make it possible to easily transfer from BWI to Dulles and also travel to and from other cities there. There is the near by old dominion rail line that is now a rail trail and this seems like a practical way to connect Washington dc to dulles via rail and provide the aforementioned benefits.

Moreover, it is good for people traveling south by terminating the rail service near the highway and rental car agencies.

FRN9 wrote:The NEC has stations at Newark and BWI and in Europe rail stations (CDG, GVA, AMS etc) often have connections to high speed intercity rail connections. An NEC connection would make it possible to easily transfer from BWI to Dulles and also travel to and from other cities there. There is the near by old dominion rail line that is now a rail trail and this seems like a practical way to connect Washington dc to dulles via rail and provide the aforementioned benefits.

Moreover, it is good for people traveling south by terminating the rail service near the highway and rental car agencies.

the Metro will be connecting to Dulles in about 4 years thus making it much easier to get to/from the airport from the city.

Yeah, just wondering if the NEC idea was ever considered as an alternative. I guess not.

For Dulles, Metro is a better option than the NEC. They would have to build facilities for turning NEC trains there which would be expensive and probably not practical either. As it is a number of NEC trains today continue south to Richmond and even further in some cases.
Noel Weaver

Are there any railroads close to Dulles?

What's disappointing to me is that there will not be express service to Dulles Airport, only local service.

I don't foresee it happening. That said, calling it nuts/pointless is probably overkill. Quite a few cities have mainline railroad service to their major airports, such as Paris and Frankfurt.

yes but handled by commuter carriers, why would Amtrak lead customers to airlines, which are a reasonable alternative for longer distance travel..

Believe it or not, in the 1950's the New Haven Railroad commissioned the great architect Eero Saarinen to design some futuristic, modern railroad stations, which were never built, in the same period it was ordering the "experimental" Talgo trainsets and Fairbanks-Morse locomotives (and other manufacturers' trainsets) for Boston-New York.

Eero Saarinen was the architect for the Dulles Airport Terminal, the former JFK TWA terminal and the St. Louis Gateway Arch.

All of them a far cry from the new "Gateway Station" in St. Louis, in terms of esthetics.

gprimr1 wrote:Are there any railroads close to Dulles?

What's disappointing to me is that there will not be express service to Dulles Airport, only local service.

Nope, nowhere near. Once, the W&OD--an always struggling branchline from Alexandria to Purcellville--ran by Dulles, but it's been gone for 40 years. Metro is simply not set up for express trains. You need multiple tracks, like the NY subway.

On the main topic, Dulles is on the way to nowhere. It would maked no sense to extend the NEC there from Union Station.

But is possible via the old W&OD right of way? Does it connect in a manner that make it possible to offer two track electrified service there?

gprimr1 wrote:Are there any railroads close to Dulles?

What's disappointing to me is that there will not be express service to Dulles Airport, only local service.

The closest active tracks may actually be way up in Gaithersburg MD, the same tracks used by Amtrak and the MARC Brunswick line. I suspect that the topography of the Potomac valley wasn't conducive to track building through the area, unlike many other rivers, at least for access to Union Station.

The Metro is a start though, and the real benefit will probably for those in the northern Virginia suburbs who work in DC, reverse commuters out to the McLean/Tyson's Corner area and those who need the international services out of Dulles unavailable at the often more accessible DCA (Reagan National). It's almost like the Piccadilly Line in London - it's the slow way to Heathrow with all the local stops, but it's inexpensive versus the Heathrow Express trains to Paddington, which usually still needs a Tube connection to somewhere else in the London area anyway. Just a shame that Dulles won't have a competing rail service anytime soon.

As to the NEC itself, a logical extension is really along the RF&P to Richmond. To some extent, Amtrak seems to already consider that to be part of the NEC as it issues a NEC/Mid-Atlantic timetable down to Newport News.

Why would Amtrak lead passengers to airlines? That's easy. It's called realism. Beyond the northeast, Amtrak carries about 1% of passengers on intercity travel. So if you're travelling outside NEC, for example from Wilmington to Nashville, you can take a puddlejumper to Dulles or Acela to Dulles. I would take Acela, as would most sane people. Most business travelers are not going to take some myriad combo of LD trains over a 48 hour course to get from the northeast to other parts of the country. Sending Amtrak to Dulles would open up a lot of revenue streams that aren't open now because it only really serves travelers in the corridor market. I'm a little surprised at the negativity toward this concept. It makes a heck of a lot more sense than the other golden child programs we discuss, like daily Sunset, Sunset East, daily Cardinal, Pioneer, NC Hiawatha...