23-03-12 PHOTOS: Alexandria

The joint station at Alexandria, VA works as a popular "railfan hack" for those wanting to travel to the DC Metro, but either want take LD trains that don't allow for intra-NEC travel or want more freedom to observe the power change at Union Station. Regardless I had never availed myself of this trick and in fact had never visited the Alexandria station until a friend who was staying in Crystal City suggested meeting up for a railfan activity and meeting up at the Alexandria station presented itself as the best solution. This set of photos ( mirror ) includes all of the action at Alexandria along with some unrelated CSX trains caught at the Savage MARC station.

While waiting on southbound Palmetto Train 89 at BWI, a northbound Regional appeared with ACS-86 #650 to pick up a sizable weekend crowd. I've noticed that Amtrak BWI ridership is fairly competitive with Baltimore Penn.

In a twist of fate, my Tran 89 was being powered by #650's direct sibling, #651.

At Washington Union Station, #651 was replaced with the rather threadbare Amtrak P42DC #125.

The Bradford Pear trees were just starting to bloom as #129 made its station stop at Alexandria.

This was followed up by northbound Regional Train #88 and P42DC #17.

As Train 88 was doing its work, a loaded southbound CSX coal train rounded the bend led by ES44AC #3199 and CM44AC rebuild #7202, with ET44AC #3463 pushing on the rear.

The joint station at Alexandria was served by a confederation of southern railroads, namely The Southern and the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac. According to the info board it opened for service in 1905.

 

Although the station building is of modest size, it was built with two separate, yet equal ticket windows to serve both passengers in the main waiting room and those checking baggage in a smaller adjacent room.

The station had two tracks for passenger operations, although a third, freight bypass track, can be used to handle passengers in an emergency.

The third Amtrak train I caught that morning was westbound Amtrak Cardinal Train #51, led by P42DC #192.

With my friend needing to go, I headed up to the adjacent King Street DC Metro station where a 6k series Blue Line train soon appeared. Due to a reconstruction of the Metro's own Long Bridge over the Potomac, Yellow Line service had been suspended so I was forced to take the long route back to Union Station.

I was going to return to BWI via MARC and back at Union Station I ran into MARC kab kar #7849 on track #8, next to the rear of an Amtrak Regional on track #9 and MARC ML cab car #8059 on track #10.

Departing Union my train passed MARC Mp36PH-3C #27 and Amtrak MP15 #533.

In an unrelated trip I had time to kill near Savage, MD and decided to see what was up at the MARC station there. It wasn't a peak period so MARC wasn't running, but I did catch a CSX PSR special led by EH44AC #808, with a second EH44, #781, located between the block of New York City municipal waste and the block of manifest freight.

That's all for now. Next time I head back to Dallas to track down some ex-Amtrak bi-levels hiding in DART country.