Could Maryland finally be ready to replace Baltimore’s oldest rail tunnel?

Baltimore Penn Station and the trains which pass through it are set for some pretty exciting changes over the next few years. The station itself is set for a major overhaul starting potentially as early as this year and a bill to study expanding MARC (Maryland Area Rail Commuter) service to include Penn Line trains to Delaware and Virginia and creating a link between MARC’s Penn and Camden Lines, was recently vetoed by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan but has enough legislative support in Annapolis that it’s still likely to pass into law by the end of January 2021, especially after a recent study found high demand for one of its key provisions.

But none of these recent plans and developments are anywhere near as feasible or commercially viable without another much-anticipated project in the works for an even longer period of time — the reconstruction by Amtrak of the B&P (Baltimore and Potomac) Tunnel.

This is the 147-year old rail tunnel between West Baltimore and Baltimore Penn Stations which almost every passenger train passes through between Baltimore and Washington, DC (As well as two Norfolk Southern freight trains per day).

With ⅕ of all of Amtrak’s passenger trips and ⅓ of its ticket revenue dependent on travel through Baltimore, replacing the B&P Tunnel is arguably just as important to the future of the Northeast Corridor as the more high-profile Gateway Program in New York and New Jersey and the Long Bridge in Washington, DC and Virginia and has been the subject of discussion for about as long as each of those two other projects.

But thanks to a recent grant from the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), years of planning between Amtrak and the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT), and assistance from the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA), who will replace a section of track near the tunnel, those discussions may suddenly be that much closer to finally becoming a reality.

To be sure, the idea of replacing the B&P Tunnel isn’t particularly new. The tunnel owes its very existence to the need, after the Civil War, for the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad and its parent company, the Pennsylvania Railroad to get their trains from Baltimore to Washington without crossing onto the tracks of their bitter rival, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

The tunnel itself consists of three smaller tunnels, the Gilmor, Wilson, and John Street Tunnels, connected by a pair of open-air cuts, all running beneath the West Baltimore neighborhoods of Bolton Hill, Madison Park, and Upton.

It’s received several modifications since then, including at least four different attempts in the 1910’s, 1930’s, 1950’s, and 1980’s to lower its floor to create more clearance and repair the tunnel’s lining but none of these fixes were ever intended to be permanent.

As more and more trains use the B&P Tunnel, its materials have deteriorated and water has seeped in with increasing frequency, even forcing Amtrak to make emergency repairs in 2014 when the water infiltration got particularly bad.

As early as 2008, Congress had already voted to approve a study of replacing the B&P Tunnel, one which was eventually funded as part of the Obama Administration’s stimulus package and released in 2015, and GGWash wrote about the tunnel’s future back in 2009.

But what the stimulus funding did not include was the money actually required to replace the tunnel. That’s set the stage for five years of debate among transit planners and rail enthusiasts over whether to rebuild the B&P Tunnel or replace it outright, albeit a debate that was largely settled in favor of the replacement option in 2017 when the FRA issued its Record of Decision on the B&P Tunnel Project.

Technically, it would theoretically be possible for Amtrak or MDOT to go back and try to make the FRA change the Record of Decision. But that would also essentially mean giving back any money that’s been budgeted for the project a là the Baltimore Red Line except with a project that’s both more expensive ($4.5 billion at the most recent estimate) and would take significantly longer to complete (About a decade if the tunnel’s replaced, probably longer under the “rebuild” option).

So for the most part, the push to replace the B&P Tunnel has trudged along, still very much in the planning stages, but also still very much unfunded. Over the past year or so, however, the B&P Tunnel Project has slowly, gradually started to show some signs of life, even as the COVID-19 pandemic has prevented it from getting started in earnest this particular calendar year.

Other projects like the renovation and expansion of Baltimore Penn Station and the Virginia through-running and Camden-Penn Line connection provisions of the MARC Train Expansion of Service Act have emerged which rely heavily on having the train traffic chokepoint that is the current B&P Tunnel freed up for their logistical and commercial viability.

The B&P Tunnel has also been prominently featured in both the Greater Washington Partnership’s Blueprint for Regional Mobility and the initial draft version of the MTA’s Central Maryland Regional Transit Plan as local business and civic leaders hope to capitalize on developments like the arrival of Amazon just over 40 miles away in Arlington County, Virginia.

No less an authority than John Porcari, who served as Maryland’s Secretary of Transportation under Governors Parris Glendening and Martin O’Malley and U.S. Deputy Secretary of Transportation under President Barack Obama, has said “If you put four tracks between Baltimore and DC, you triple the MARC ridership, and Maryland has its Silver Line.”

Some of that’s because of the economic and employment boost provided by all the businesses, developers, taxpayers, and transit services which stand to benefit from the B&P Tunnel.

But even the 10 plus years of construction required to replace the B&P Tunnel could suddenly be a godsend to a local workforce badly in need of a post-COVID boost and facing an otherwise relatively bare transit project pipeline once the Purple Line’s finished in a few years.

Plus Maryland’s successful effort over the past year or so to solidify a stronger working relationship with CSX and the FRA in order to get Baltimore’s other major rail tunnel, the freight-specific Howard Street Tunnel, funded, could potentially open the door for similar developments with the B&P Tunnel.

But the strongest sign that the B&P Tunnel might finally be shovel-ready, perhaps even within the next three to four years when the new tunnel’s design will likely be finished, is undoubtedly last month’s announcement by the FRA that it had awarded an $8 million grant to Amtrak (with MDOT and MTA support) to help rehabilitate and upgrade a five-mile stretch of track between West Baltimore, the MARC station just south of the tunnel, and Halethorpe in southwestern Baltimore County.

The short-term effects of this grant would be impressive enough, as MDOT MTA Director of Media Relations Brittany Marshall estimated that “Amtrak’s track improvements will upgrade the track speed for Track A (the track used by northbound Penn Line trains) between the MARC West Baltimore station and the MARC Halethorpe station from 60 mph to 90 mph.”

But what makes this grant truly significant is that with the B&P Tunnel’s replacement set to take over a decade, upgrading the track between West Baltimore and Halethorpe is absolutely essential to create the track redundancy needed to avoid Northeast Corridor traffic slowing to an unmanageable crawl during that time.

“There’s a lot of benefits to it”, said Greater Washington Partnership Director of Transportation Policy Joe McAndrew of the new trackwork deal, also citing the need to improve the track to accommodate higher-speed trains. “Eventually, we need four tracks between Baltimore and DC. If we have an existing track that isn’t built up to go fast, we should build it to go fast.”

But, McAndrew explained, even raising the speed capability for the track is crucial for creating more track redundancy.

“What’s important about building it to go fast now is that when we’re actually ready to begin construction, we will be in position and that track will be upgraded so that that can be active,” McAndrew said. “So we can go ahead and take some tracks out to do construction on the tunnel. It’s a pre-construction activity that we have to do either way. It gives them redundancy to have a fast track. We have the redundancy today but the trains would all have to slow down to 30 miles an hour. It creates greater redundancy at a more efficient track speed.”

Finally, given the FRA’s high standards for awarding grants, which were already fairly stringent even before the current economic downturn, it’s fairly unlikely the agency would have awarded such a large one, with clear implications for the B&P Tunnel, if it didn’t have some confidence that grant’s beneficiaries might soon be ready to pursue the funding for a much larger undertaking: the B&P Tunnel itself.