Comprehensive regional rail from Baltimore through to Richmond by 2045? A new coalition thinks it’s possible.

Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Richmond haven’t seen a lot of new rail service over the past two decades — but it’s not for lack of transit plans. There have been plans to tackle every mode of transit in every city, a mode-agnostic “Regional Transit Plan” for Central Maryland, a plan for improving transit in Baltimore City, and a plan specifically for Maryland’s commuter rail… the list goes on.

Missing in the “Capital Region,” as the Greater Washington Partnership calls it, is a vision of what it would take to create “regional” rail between all three cities. It is for that task that a coalition of business groups, legislators, transit agencies, and other groups launched the Capital Region Rail Vision Project early last month. The initiative will bring interested parties together to map out the path to an efficient, interconnected rail system connecting the entire region before 2045.

“The intent is to step back a second and say to ourselves ‘what is our ideal outcome? What’s the ideal future state of our region’s rail system?” said Joe McAndrew, Director of Transportation Policy for the Greater Washington Partnership. “What does that mean for the region? If we were to have, say, 30-minute headways between Baltimore and Washington, DC, what does that mean for the State of Maryland and for the region’s economy, for job production and economic productivity? And from there, do the potential benefits outweigh the potential costs?”

The initiative’s first phase will be a “vision report” outlining goals like faster trains and commuter lines running between Maryland and Virginia, as well as the benefits, costs and outcomes of those goals, McAndrew said. The second phase, a technical report, will outline specific steps to make regional rail a reality.

The stakeholders behind the Capital Region Rail Vision Project are hoping its comprehensive perspective will distinguish it from previous plans. For instance, McAndrew said existing commuter rail plans fail to account for run-through trains, trains that continue through an arbitrary geographic boundary, such as a state line. Currently, neither MARC nor VRE have plans accounting for crossover that would allow a train coming from Baltimore to run all the way into Virginia, or vice versa.

Ultimately, the goal of the Capital Region Rail Vision Project is to look at all the various plans for individual parts of the region equally, harmonize them, and figure out how to translate that into better rail service for the Capital Region as a whole. “At the end of the day, demand doesn’t end at Union Station or the Potomac River,” McAndrew said. “People in our region wake up in one jurisdiction and go to work in another at a rate of about 50% in non-coronavirus times. So we need to make sure our transportation system [and not just our roadways] can also do that.”

Those goals are reflected in the wide array of stakeholders already lined up behind the Capital Region Rail Vision Project. Supporters of the project include past and present elected officials from Alexandria, Fairfax County, Prince George’s County, and the Maryland General Assembly, transit agencies across Maryland, DC, and Virginia, prominent local developers, corporations like Amazon, transportation unions, and business advocacy groups.

One such supporter is the BWI Business Partnership, which advocates for the businesses in and around BWI Thurgood Marshall International Airport. A regional rail plan would help BWI-area businesses, especially those with headquarters in Virginia and offices in Maryland, said Executive Director Gina Stewart.

Maryland State Delegate Jared Solomon, a Montgomery County Democrat and supporter of the plan, said getting the vision on paper is the first step toward making regional rail a reality through legislation.

“The first step is to get a plan on paper we can rally people behind, that we can get the funding for, that we can get the administrative buy-in for,” Solomon said. “The first step is to have a plan and then you can start rallying people around that plan.”

This kind of regional system has been done before. In Germany, for instance, the Rhine-Ruhr-Stadtbahn connects several cities and towns throughout the Rhine-Ruhr region via five smaller light rail systems run by four different operators, each in turn broken down into smaller lines. That rail system is a part of a larger network of all the other bus, rail, and tram networks in the region.

While it’s too early to know exactly what will be in the Capital Region Rail Vision Project’s reports, Solomon and McAndrew expect recommendations will include through-running MARC trains into Virginia (and vice versa for VRE trains into Maryland) and creating a connection between the MARC Penn and Camden Lines.

Though the current COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic shocks may pose immediate barriers to some of the project’s recommendations, Solomon said those recommendations will still be crucial for helping to shape the Capital Region’s economy coming out of the pandemic.

“I do believe that when life returns to normal, rail will recover,” Solomon said. “And it will be an integral part to the recovery and continued economic growth and strength of our region.”