Board of Directors Meeting   8/26/2025

The Manila Envelope that Mr. Delandro is building right now, it's got free punch holes, free hole punch, that you can put into your binder and replace the old stuff.

So we're just updating that information.

Good morning.

We're going to call this APRA board meeting to order on August 26th, 2025.

Madam Chair and Senate Director, members of the board, good morning.

Good morning.

All right, let's begin our safety briefing.

We're located at 919 East Main Street on the fourth floor.

For the women's restroom, you'll make a left around the corner.

It's on the left side.

For the women's restroom, you'll make a right around the corner.

It's on the right side.

There's a stairwell, there's a fire alarm near both restrooms.

There's a fire extinguisher near the women's restroom, and also down the hall of the women's restroom.

For an AED, we'll have security for that.

The first eight kids located on the table on the back wall, right?

Mary Stone Douglas will call 9-1-1.

Her backup is Steve Pinner.

I am the motivation of CPR.

My backup is Joseph Bynum.

Michael Glovin, who leads First Responders, his backup is Michael Glovin.

If you're going to get evacuated, ensure the person to your left is present at our assembly point as George Washington

Badger, or Nova Chi, K Capital Square.

If you see something, say something.

Important to security, but follow 9-1-1.

Following 9-1-1 is very important to do that, all right?

We have an active shooter, and we can either flee, fight, or fight.

If those participated virtually, knowing your medical emergency can create some strategy.

We have an university.

All right, let's have a safe day.

Thank you.

Thanks, Lamar.

Thank you.

And also please watch the trip and gadgets as well as your vehicle.

Thank you.

Susan.

Susan.

Darien.

Welcome.

All right.

We're going to move to agenda item number three, and I would love to give a warm welcome to our two new board members.

Cynthia Lawrence is the Director of Workforce Development for the Carilion Clinic in Roanoke.

Certainly.

I'm delighted to be here.

I am new to this board, but have been a longtime serving member on several transportation related boards, including the local airport authority for 12 years.

I was also reminded I was on the Virginia Museum of Transportation board for a while.

That's been a while.

ago, but my most recent tenure has been on the State Lottery Board.

I was on that board for 20 years.

So I certainly appreciate the opportunity to serve in this capacity and then representing the western part of the state.

It's very important.

Thank you, Cynthia.

And we also want to welcome Susan Spears, who is the President and CEO of the Fredericksburg Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Thank you.

I'm delighted to be here in the Fredericksburg region, which you know, if you aren't on a train, but you're in a car on 95, that's the spot where all the traffic stops every time.

So we at the Chamber have spent a lot of time around that issue.

So I'm very excited to have the opportunity to dive further into having more knowledge and ability to make differences and positive change for passenger rail in the Commonwealth.

Thank you, we're so glad to have you both.

Ms. Bushu.

Ms. Doersch.

Here.

Ms. Drake.

Here.

Mr.

Flowers.

Here.

Ms. Spears?

Here.

Mr. Watkins?

Thank you.

Thank you, Maristelle.

So moving on to agenda item number five, I would ask if we have any public comment this morning.

No one signed up?

I think forward.

I move.

Thank you, Mr. Delandro and seconded by Mr.

Flowers.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

The minutes are approved.

Moving right along to agenda item number seven.

With our new board members, we have some openings on our

Subcommittees.

So I wanted to move forward.

I believe there's a slide for this one.

Oh, just the summary of what we're doing here.

We would like to nominate Ms. Spears to join the Finance Committee and Ms. Lawrence to join the Personnel and Compensation Committee.

So first I will ask if there is any questions or discussion on this topic.

And if not, I would ask for a motion to approve these VPRA committee assignments.

So moved.

Second.

Thank you, Ms. Doersch.

Thank you, Senator Watkins.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

Committee assignments are approved.

And we are rolling this morning.

Agenda item number eight.

Oh, I missed that.

That's what I thought.

Perfect.

Thank you, Mr. Delandro.

Second, Ms. Rhinehart.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

Any abstentions?

Our remote policy is approved.

I'd be happy to.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

And good morning, folks.

Thank you.

It's good to see everybody today.

We have a lot of good news.

I know that I have been covering you with emails of five-day notices of agreements that are moving forward.

So just a good news meeting.

There are a lot of positive things going on, and I look forward to sharing them with you today.

Just some quick updates.

One of the things that I've received a lot of questions about, in the last six weeks or so, there was a merger proposed between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern.

We obviously have good agreements with Norfolk Southern, not only for running over their network, but also our purchase of Manassas Line, our extension of

I'm happy to say that everything that we have negotiated with Norfolk Southern stays as it exists in our agreements.

There's no risk to our agreements at all.

In fact,

Union Pacific has a strong history of being friendly to passenger rail.

Their current CEO, Jim Venna, I worked with when I was the Chief Operating Officer at Amtrak.

He was at CN back then, but just always very supportive and understanding that freight network has to work well with passenger network.

So I see this as either a net neutral or positive thing.

So any concerns you may have, I'm happy to talk about, but we're in a good position here.

So that's good news.

That's great.

We, speaking of things that cause concern, but really don't need to, we've had administration change, as you know, and the first couple months of the new administration in Washington, DC, there were some concerns that things should be held up and that, that we may have some of our funding or projects at risk.

Thrilled to say that Mike and I, Michael Westerman, a whole bunch of us have met with FRA and DOT staff on multiple occasions.

They are fully supportive of our projects.

They,

have been incredibly respectful of our list of, here are the things we need from you.

We've got grants from them already.

If we don't get our approval of our PMP by this date, it's gonna cause us problems.

They hear that, they respect it, and they get us what we need on time, whether it's NEPA reevaluations or grant agreements.

They have really been fantastic, so we continue to work well with them.

Can I chime in there?

Yeah, sure, of course.

I just wanted to add to that as a sister agency at DRPT wearing my other hat, we also have had really great continued operations with FRA and FTA for what it's worth.

My chief of rail Emily Stock is here and we also have had meetings on our grants and getting things done.

And even though there has been some staff turnover, we have not been held up in any of our work or in any of our funding partnerships.

So it's good news all around so far.

Can I ask one question on that?

I think DOT, they're rebidding though, their Feds Day Partnership POP, right?

So we submitted for fiscal year 2024 and they're going to rebid that.

We had one grant application in that that was for the Staunton Station and we do intend to resubmit that.

They came back and they told us, your application, you'll have to reapply.

It'll be combined 24 and 25 and we intend to do that.

And then the third bullet, as we met in June, we came to you all with a budget amendment.

Part of that budget amendment was changing the phasing and the location of a number of sidings on the RFMP, which is the railroad between Washington DC and Richmond.

You all approved those siting, phasing, and location movements.

We have worked with CSX and we have signed and gotten approved the amended comprehensive rail agreement and JOMA, which again is good news, continued progress.

In fact, yesterday I sent an email, we finalized the agreements for design work on those three sidings.

They're all over $5 million.

So notified you yesterday, assuming no one has any concerns between now and next Monday, we'll sign those Monday and work will continue.

So more good news.

There will be some bad news later.

FY25 Annual Incentive Planning Goals.

So these are the goals that we track every single, really every day, but we report them every month in our Executive Directors Report.

And then we talk about them every time we meet, the four or five times a year that we meet.

I'm happy to say that we have met all of our FY25 goals with a big asterisk.

And the asterisk is in the first goal, it was increase ridership by 3% while achieving a cost recovery goal of 70%.

Our ridership increase was 4.8%, which was fantastic.

Ridership continues to grow, and we continue to show we put the trains out there, people are going to ride them.

Our recovery goal was 70%.

We achieved 76%, and here's where the asterisk is.

We have not closed our books yet.

Because we work with VRS, the Virginia Retirement System, we need to wait for them to give us our final accruals.

For better or for worse, those accrued figures pretty much

Cascade through all of our numbers, most if not all of our numbers.

So any financial information you'll see here doesn't include that in cruel.

In fact, it's through May and not through June.

This time last year on the 26th of August last year, we had all of that information.

Right now we have only 40% of it, Mr. Pittard, we don't have all of it.

And so we expect over the next couple of days, we'll roll that through the numbers.

Jinxing it, we'd be shocked if it brought our cost recovery from 76 below 70.

We'd be shocked if it brought it down to 75 and a half, but we don't know until we know.

So that's the one goal that's still outstanding.

That's why it shows it's still outstanding.

That's why it shows on track.

The other goals, Long Bridge, our other major projects, secure organizational goals, we met or exceeded all of those.

So it really just shows it was a great year for VPRA.

Spoiler alert, this afternoon, we will be going over in detail our FY26 goals and talking about what our organization will measure ourselves against next year.

So we'll talk about that later today.

Any questions on 25 goals?

Okay, passenger service updates.

Washington Union Station, this is a long time coming.

Track 22, those of you that have gone north through Union Station on the far left of those lower level tracks is Track 22.

Track 22 for a very long time has been a storage crack.

In DC, when you're going north, you're being pulled by a diesel engine until you get to Washington, DC.

Washington, DC north, the trains are electric, they're run under catenary, so they change the engine there from diesel to electric, or when you're going south, they change it from electric to diesel.

Track 22 was used as a storage track where you could stage those locomotives and switch them and they would go, knock on wood, on a good day, relatively smoothly.

They wanted to, and rightfully so, expand Track 22 to put a platform there so you could actually use it to board and alight trains there.

That project has been going on for a few years.

Thankfully, it is completed.

So for a while, they could not even be used as a storage track.

Now you can use it to board, and you can also use it as storage.

Big, big improvement in the capacity there, and that finally was completed.

So that's good news.

Kudos to Amtrak, and it should help our service become even more reliable.

Here's the ridership update.

It's the first month of the fiscal year, July.

As you can see, we're over 10% year over year, which is great news.

We're only showing the one month, but we started off the year really positively, which is great.

If you look at ridership route by route, every single one was up.

Newport News leading the way with 15% over Richmond, 10% over.

Just continued good news on the ridership side.

July was our second highest ridership month in history.

So we continue to grow in the good news.

And another shout out to Amtrak for the partnership and finding that sweet spot between ridership and revenue.

Here is the comparison of other state-supported trains.

This is number of riders per train, and we compare it to North Carolina, to New York, and to Pennsylvania.

We continue to have more riders per train.

A lot of that is due to what Ms. Spears pointed out, the traffic north of Fredericksburg is not friendly to us.

But the other part is that we just offer good service at the right times to get people where they want to go.

Sit and look at this for a minute.

Cosmic Cover, we talked about this before.

You see, back in 17, we were above 70.

We feel strongly that we need to make this as high as possible because when you look at public transportation really across the world, if you're on buses, if you're on transit, and you're on the metro, you're on subway, anywhere, I'm not just talking about this area,

If you're 20-30% for public transportation, you really feel good about yourself.

The fact that we're above 70 is great news.

The fact that we could potentially get even higher than 80.

For a while, the Lynchburg train, when we first started the Lynchburg train, this is a story that we tell often.

Sorry about that for those of you that have been here a while.

But we thought that there would be 30,000 riders on that Lynchburg train.

And there was a huge negotiation between Virginia and Amtrak saying, OK, you're going to have 30,000 riders.

It's going to cost us $100 to run this train.

You'll probably get $60 worth of revenue.

Who pays that extra $40?

And that was a big fight about who pays that extra $40.

And we ended up, none of these numbers were right.

We ended up getting 100,000 riders.

That number's right.

and it cost $100 to run.

We pulled in about $130 and we were fighting over who got to keep that extra money.

And that was just a good news for us.

It cost us over 100%.

Obviously we're not over 100% now as we add more service, but come 2030 when Long Bridge is done and we go from the current eight frequencies to 13, that's a lot of revenue that is above and beyond the cost.

So we're comfortable that we'll be staying above 70 and

being closer to 100 is better.

But this continues to be a good news story.

DJ, correct me if I'm wrong, this is nation-leading information, right?

I believe that's correct for the states.

Now, in the Northeast Corridor, there are times, there are months when they actually do well.

And then the Auto Train too is different because on the Auto Train, they charge for the car.

And so that actually quite frequently gets close to 100%, but yes.

Jeremy will jump up Chris.

Yeah, that's correct.

Any questions about the passenger service update?

Capital project updates.

We're going to go through the capital projects and we'll talk more about a lot of these later.

Those of you that drive into DC or those of you that take the train into DC, I hope you're taking a moment to look at the work that's going on both on the north package and the south package.

The construction out there is amazing.

The size of machines is overwhelming.

But here's the Long Bridge.

We continue to move forward.

We executed that Phase 2 contract last month, and they hit the ground running.

They're doing a lot of work there.

You can see as you go through, and you can see this as you go north, just before Lafont Plaza, if you go north on the left-hand side, if you go south on the right-hand side, they've torn out the track there, and they're strengthening the crash wall.

So the work there has absolutely begun, and it's moving forward quickly.

Here you can see the overhead shot.

This is the portals building.

This is the track that should go right into the font.

This is going to be one of the most challenging portions of the project for a couple of reasons.

Number one, for more than a couple of reasons.

Number one, you're going over roads that have traffic 24 hours a day.

And so we've got to work the main traffic plans, the LP plans.

We also have to deal with the DC noise restrictions.

You can't make any noise before 7 a.m. or after 7 p.m.

So that's a real tight area, the railroad.

Additionally, that's the area where we have two existing tracks and we're building two new tracks right next to them.

I mean, literally right next to them.

So you can't do work on those two tracks without fouling the two existing tracks.

So that's where it is really the most complex.

If you go to the river, the two tracks on the Long Bridge going over the river, they're separate.

So there's work that can be done without fouling those tracks because it's a whole separate structure that's being built.

But making good progress.

I sent out an email.

Earlier this month or perhaps late last month about the heritage tree, we had thought that we would have to move the heritage tree, but instead we're going to pay the district to plant dozens of more trees.

So that was a win-win for everybody continuing to move forward really strongly on this project.

South Package, similarly, we recently signed, well, we signed this contract back in January and they have brought that to 60% design or almost a 60% design.

Big work is going on on the river.

As you go over the river going north, if you look to the right, you'll see barges and you can see they're doing some of the research work, the geotechnical work that needs to be done that helps them determine how deep they've got to drill.

And I think we've got a film actually.

Yeah, here we go.

I will say this, I was previewing this film, they sent me the film and I said, yes, we absolutely need to show it during the board meeting.

And I was watching it and I was taking notes.

I'm like, all right, I need to learn what all this stuff is because they're going to ask me, what's this?

What's this?

And I'm watching.

And then I finally watched it with my sound on and I don't have to learn anything.

So that's a summary of the work that's ongoing.

I do want to point out, if you go to that website, I emailed this out to you earlier this month.

There's just, our communications team is doing a great job.

I mean, one of the challenges in major construction projects is you don't want to surprise the general public and you don't want folks to not be ready for something that's going to impact them.

We had public meetings and I sent you the link.

We've got newsletters, we've got public meetings, we've got videos that are shown before film festivals in the district that say, hey, you live near Main Avenue and this is what's going to happen.

Here are the benefits.

I mean, there's going to be some pain that we're going to be realizing between now and 2030 when this opens.

But Jerrica and her team are doing a fantastic job of keeping the public notified.

No surprises, you all heard me say it many times.

So we're going to keep going.

But I encourage you to, when people ask you about the project, go to the website because there's just a wealth of information there.

I will just add in one note and let the board know that DJ also presented to a recent

Northern Virginia Transportation Committee meeting on all of this.

And they had questions and that was great.

And we are continually sharing his executive director's report with that group.

Thank you.

All right, fourth track, this just goes further south.

Once you are heading south and you go and complete the south package, which is right at the Long Bridge Aquatic Center, you get into an area of Alexandria fourth track.

CSX put the bids out on this.

They are due to come back to CSX two days from now.

When we get those bids, we will likely have to make a budget adjustment because the current dollar amounts are based on what we had three or four years ago.

They were just a 30% design.

We've talked to CSX and we're comfortable that we can fund what's coming in, but we don't know until we know.

So those bids will come in on the 28th.

It'll take a little bit of time to review them and to make sure we're comfortable with the bids.

So CSX does a lot of the flagging work and they do a lot of the coordination.

They're getting a contractor to come in and do the actual construction.

We'll have bids later this week.

And then when we come back to the October board meeting, we'll like, we'll give an update and we'll like to be asking for a budget amendment.

So just to face that.

Going then the next Project South is the Franconia-Springfield Bypass.

This work is ongoing.

We've got the 100% designs that came in in July.

You can see work going there.

They did a lot of tree clearing there.

This is one of the ones that we received a grant from the Federal Railroad Administration.

It's a $100 million CRISI grant.

CRISI is the Consolidated Rail Improvement and Safety Investment.

Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and State Improvement.

I'm glad that we wrote it down.

That's a $100 million grant.

We have been told that we will get that grant agreement back to us and sign by the end of September, likely in the next couple of weeks.

Because we don't have another board meeting between now and October 7th, we are asking that you all approve a resolution that would give me the authority to execute that grant agreement.

This is one, any agreement over $50 million, whether we're paying $50 million for construction to be done or whether we're receiving more than $50 million, I need to get authority from you all to approve it.

So any questions or further discussion on that item?

Second.

Thank you, Mr.

Flowers.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

All opposed?

Any abstentions?

Usually the accepting money ones are pretty easy.

But work keeps on going on that and feels great about the partnership we have with the folks there.

Next comes Spring County to Lorton Third Track.

This is on schedule.

They've selected a contractor from the early road construction.

We're watching closely the tree moratorium times that we've got to deal with because we can only cut trees during a certain time, but this one continues to go forward as planned.

New River Valley update.

This one also, this is being done completely by Norfolk Southern.

As I think folks know, they are constructing the new platform, lighting and parking at the Christianburg Station.

And then they're also constructing the Radford Layer Facility, which is about nine miles further west.

This continues to be on schedule and on budget.

They are in constant communication.

We have folks that go down there a lot.

Dr. Smoot, I think many of you know, he visits there more often than I see my kids.

I mean, it's amazing, but

Keeping it on track.

Here's some pictures that you can read the captions yourself.

I don't need to read them to you, but it's a good news story how quickly this is going.

As folks who were at the groundbreaking ceremony back in April or May know, that community just is so excited about this rail coming, and we're going to get it no later than 2027.

So here is some pictures from the Cambria Station site, and then I've also got pictures from the Radford Layover site.

Work is continuing quickly.

Any questions on those projects?

All right, we've talked here at nauseum about the right-of-way challenges.

Thankfully, not only have we seen the light at the end of the tunnel, but we're out of that tunnel and we continue to make great progress.

Here's just a summary of where we are on those, Long Bridge North and South.

None of those, I'll jinx this, sorry about this, Mr. Westman, none of those plats

Those are negotiations that are in progress are slowing up the project at this time and we don't expect them to.

Amtrak is actually handing those that's in the district and we don't have the same powers in the district.

Obviously, we have Virginia Amtrak is is working those for us.

And and they have been, again, really good partners on that.

So so that's moving forward.

Fourth track and bypass are complete.

That's great news.

And we're almost done with the negotiations.

So this is a

A significant challenge for us that we have negotiated ourselves through, and now we're at risk.

Sightings update.

Here's an update on the sightings project.

Things are just moving forward.

We'll talk in a second about sighting A, but the sightings, as you saw, were moved around a little bit and rephased, and then we're moving forward on them.

Citing A is the big one that's coming next, $157 million.

You can see the location there.

We are just about to sign an agreement with CSX to do this work.

Here's the detail.

It's about $117 million.

Here's the work that they're doing.

They're doing all the construction, all the utility coordination, except for Stafford County.

Now, if you remember a few months ago, you all approved Stafford County.

We're going to move the utilities for Stafford County, and then they're going to pay us back in a couple of years when they can get the money.

So we're dealing with that.

Other than that, CSX is dealing with it.

We're doing all the environmental work, which is for quickly, might need to be done, but it's

Any questions or further discussion about this item?

Thank you, Mr. Delandro.

Second.

Thank you, Mr. Payne.

All opposed?

Any abstentions?

Okay, that is the end of the capital projects update.

Let me just go through the capital and operating grants.

Yes, please.

We, Mr. Doersch, think we put in for a Staunton State of Good Repair and ADA improvement grant of $11.5 million for the FRA federal state partnership.

As you see on the chart, as we talked about earlier, they're going to re-advertise that and combine it with 24 and 25.

The good news is there'll be a lot of money available and our grant request or our application still has a very strong case.

As many of you know, I feel very strongly that every day that goes by that our stations in Virginia are not ADA compliant.

That is a bad day.

And yes, they are ADA accessible.

So every single station, if you come there in a wheelchair or if you come in a scooter, you can get on the train, but that doesn't make it compliant.

And until we're compliant, we're not doing our job.

So this will help us get that end of compliance.

When they re-advertise it, we will put in for it quickly.

We're also looking at other opportunities.

We'll just have to wait till the notice of funding opportunity comes out so we can see what kind of things they're looking for.

Thankfully, all of our current projects that we talk about here are fully funded.

It's new things that we add on that we'd be looking for funding.

And then late last month, Enrico put in an application on our behalf for $1,500 to help with the Richmond layer facility that we talked about.

Part of that money comes from Amtrak.

Hopefully we'll get some from CTA as well, and then we'll be providing the rest.

And we'll find out the disposition of that when they go through their process.

And then finally, the FY26 budget, both the House and the Senate have put in a congressionally directed spending, which is what all us old people used to call earmarks, in $2 million.

We'll wait and see if that's passed.

That would just be supplemental funding for fourth.

Here are the outstanding grants.

These are both grants that are going to Norfolk Southern.

When we signed the Norfolk Southern deal years ago, we had what was called a Western Rail Initiative that was extra money that they could use to improve passenger rail west of Manassas.

We had dedicated funding going to the Nokesville to Calvertoon double track, and then we had $36.5 million going to the Roanoke Yard.

improvements.

They're going to spend more than $36.5 million, but they always thought they would.

The balance of that fund will come from the Western Rail Initiative.

And there's plenty of money in the Western Rail Initiative for that.

So these things are continuing to move along.

They will be done before 2026, before the new service goes from Roto to New River Valley.

And that completes the capital project and grant update.

Any questions for me?

I'm going to ruin Mr. Pitter's birthday and ask him to provide us with an update on revenue and investment.

Mr. Pitter?

I didn't say that.

No, just the rest of my week.

You know, it's been over your 60th birthday.

Before I jump in, I'll retire everything I do want to say.

I think we're leaving, I think, a very good financial position.

I think we've seen prior audits, you'll see this audit go.

But also the financial team, they're all here.

They're a really strong team.

So I don't think anybody needs to worry about finance here at VPRA.

I also want to say the agency as a whole come a long way from ground zero, really.

Three people and nothing.

Empty bookcases, DJ points out.

But capital projects, you just heard from Mr. Spadler, those are moving along very well now and actual construction going on.

Also, the backbone of our agency as a whole, got project management information system installed.

We're working on asset management because that's important, especially owning a lot of quarter assets now.

Also, if you want to say the ridership, DJ talked about this for a moment.

It's very important, the record ridership, the cost recovery, those are all very important things.

And early on, DJ and I met and we established that cost recovery as a key metric and I'm glad to hear that it will stay that way.

And I'm glad to hear that 70% of all we're looking at is about 35% of capacity of the trains.

Phil, on average.

There are days it's completely full, which is great, but on average, it's 35%.

And I really look at it, if we could just all get one or two more people to ride the train, we could go from that 35 to 45, and the numbers DJ was talking about, that 100%, which maybe that's a little off the other goal.

It might be achievable.

The only thing I want to add about that was it's not achieving cost recovery with a good balance of ridership to see the records.

and the revenue.

And that's important to remember as you go through, there's a balance there.

I think the fare from Richmond to Washington, I think is $14.

So we're not achieving that high recovery, charging a high rate.

So lastly, you'll see on that, I think the last few years, Jeremy and his team on that ridership effort and

Working with Amtrak also in particular, we've really formed a great partnership.

I mean, compared to, I've been doing this a long time, where we worked 10 years ago with Amtrak, it is night and day different.

There's an actual partnership.

We're working towards the same goal.

I finally just want to thank the board, DJ, the team members, everybody that works at VPRA, and then all our different partners.

Once again, thanks.

Now we'll talk about some investments.

So this is just showing our dedicated come of rail fund.

And last year the number was 163 million was the estimate.

This year you see it's grown to 172.

So about a five and a half percent increase.

Those are the funds that are dedicated to the VPRA that come out of the Transportation Trust Fund.

So all the different sources that the state collects, the transportation, we get a small percentage.

And that's what this is.

And nice to see a five and a half percent increase this year.

Next slide.

Here you'll see on the top chart, you'll see a balance of our funding that we have available today.

So we've done a really good job collecting funding in advance and being prepared to undertake all these capital projects.

But you may see back last August, we had a lot bigger balance.

It's fine.

I immediately purchased the Manassas line.

So $315 million went out the door in September.

And then you see throughout the year, a steady increase to where we're about almost $500 million today.

The bottom chart, you see a similar change in amount of money that we're earning off those investments each month, and then a slight increase as we

received throughout the year.

Next slide, gentlemen.

Going through the three policy initiatives, preservation principle being the number one effort that we're looking to do, you see we actually have a market value increase right now.

And that's because about a year ago, we locked down a portion of our funds in longer term maturities.

thought rates would be coming down.

We actually thought rates would be coming down a lot more than they had.

They have come down, and as a result, we're locked in at a little bit higher rates, and that in turn shows this, I want to emphasize our gain, but if we had the liquidate today, we would actually have more money instead of what we put in.

Next slide.

This slide's about liquidity.

Liquidity is important because we've got to fund these projects as they go, you see,

In less than one year, you see the majority $289 million of that $500 million, and then another $74 million.

And so we've mapped this to those project spends and also the other revenue sources that will be coming in.

So that's not an issue.

The other thing is the policy does require certain limitations as far as maturity.

So like commercial pay for nine months, that top

left chart showing you that we're within compliance on the investment policy.

Next slide.

Finally, this is the return showing into a benchmark that we use the Fed funds rate.

The Fed funds rate is about 4.3%.

You can see we're right at that rate of the LGIP, which is the local government investment pool that the State's Department of Treasury manages, and then also

We have part of our funds managed by an outside investment manager.

With that, I'd be glad to answer any questions.

Okay, I'm sorry.

Steve, are these returns net of any fees for the management?

The administrative updates, as we've gotten to 65 FTEs, we've really tailed off.

You don't see the hiring that you've seen over the last meetings.

We didn't have any new employees in August.

We've got eight current postings and no offers accepted, so we really have kind of plateaued in the 65 range.

As we've talked about a number of times, when we were first created, we were expected to be between 80 and 100.

We don't think we'll be over 80 anytime soon.

In fact, our future work chart has us more in the low 70s, but

We have the folks we need right now to get the job done and we'll continue to update you on this every month.

Here's our administrative budget.

It's as of May because the day after tomorrow when we get the BRS numbers, all of these are going to change, but we're in good shape on our administrative budget.

We've either come in below or we've done a good job of managing the budget.

Happy to answer any questions on this.

Again, these will change in a couple of days and we'll send them out as June final.

Budget adjustments, as you know, we are required to report to the board any budget adjustments every month.

In the month of August, there are no budget adjustments, no needed changes, so that's good news.

And then, contracting updates, any contract above $250,000 or less than $5 million, we report to the board in this monthly report.

We had one contract that fell into that.

That was our annual contract with Sudal.

They do our marketing with Amtrak and also some of our local marketing as well.

$890,000.

It's the same amount as last year, actually flat to last year.

All right, supplier diversity.

Last year, and just a reminder, these are the different categories of supplier diversity that we've got in Commonwealth Virginia established in 2006.

As you see, we've talked about these different categories.

We at VPRA have from day one been really consistent in our support of local businesses, of diverse businesses, and that support is not going to change.

Here is the definition of the federal DVE, the disadvantaged business that we follow.

We follow both of them.

We designate folks where they land there.

We don't have a requirement.

We don't put a requirement in our bids.

We don't put a requirement in our contracts.

We must do this.

But as an agency, we feel strongly that getting local money, getting small business money, getting diverse businesses as part of our portfolio makes a lot of sense.

Last year, we sat in front of this board and we set a goal of 11.5%.

There was a lot of conversation about that.

And it's our discretionary spending.

Let me point out, there's a lot of spending that we don't have any choices.

So for example, when we pay money to Amtrak, we've got to pay Amtrak.

Norfolk Southern, we've got to pay Norfolk Southern.

We can't put that out there for bid and get a small business.

So that is our non-discretionary funding.

We focus on what percentage of our discretionary spend is going to diverse suppliers.

We were hopeful, we had planned to, we had strived to get 11.5%.

As you can see here, we only hit 7.2%.

It's a bit of a disappointment.

However, if you look at everything we did, we made some very aggressive assumptions and they didn't come through.

For example, we had big construction contracts where construction companies had said, hey, 15% of my spending is going to be to diverse vendors.

What we didn't have at that time and we know now is that that 15% is back loaded because on the front end of the design work, the early works, utilities, they don't really have choices where they go for utilities.

And so a lot of that money comes in the back end.

Additionally, we had on the south package, which is good news.

We had early mobilization.

They got done earlier or they started earlier.

So we were able to pay for their insurance and we were able to pay for their mobilization early.

None of that goes to diverse businesses.

So that put our, that added a lot to our denominator with adding nothing to our numerator.

So, um, we were well below the 11 and a half percent.

That said, if you look at this start,

If you see 23 to 24 to 25, our 23 to 24 was relatively flat, but 24 to this year to 25, we saw net dollars out the door to SWAM, small businesses, diverse businesses, was up 51%, which is a huge, huge accomplishment.

So yes, well below the 11 and a half, we would rather have been at 11 and a half, but we're thrilled with the fact that our spending went up by 51%.

We have to, in our bylaws, we have committed to coming to the board and putting a goal in place every year.

Our budget itself would say that we'd be in the 5% range this year, but we want to continue to be aggressive and we think there are things that we can do to get even more aggressive.

So we are going to ask you to approve a goal of 7.5%, which would bring that spending up to, as you see there, $23.5.

We could really stretch it.

I mean, if everything fell the right way and we

We pushed everything.

We could get as high as 36, but that is our number on our best day.

And it would just take one thing falling out of place to not hit that.

So we think that the projected goal of 23.5 million, 7.5% is reasonable.

It's aggressive, but it's something that we can still hit.

This is just something that we continue to, and John Kostenuk, our Director of Procurement,

There's not been a day this decade where the word swam didn't come out of his mouth, which is good.

I mean, he is committed to and focused on making sure that we have a diverse set of suppliers.

Our proposal would be to you all to set a goal, to approve our goal of 7.5% that we continue to work towards this year.

We are excited as we always work to maximize our swam usage.

You know, we are excited.

Just what the future's gonna bring.

Like DJ said, just this year, the lion's share of our early work construction is just not realistic to just ran businesses.

It's probably one, one and a half percent, and that's gonna be other tiers.

They're not gonna be the subcontractors or the prongs.

But as the construction advances, the packages are paced by design, us, all our prongs, all our contractors, we are excited.

Vendors will call him and say, hey, I'm a small business and I really want to do business with your company.

And he'll learn what they do.

And he'll say, you know what, there's nothing that we do that aligns with what you do.

But let me walk you through how you register and how you can make yourself more available.

Thank you.

I have just one question.

Is there a local hire provision?

I know on the transit side of things, it was forbidden to use federal dollars in any way that would

Avril local, but I don't like it about SWAM.

It seems like it's a way to make sure, you know, investment in the county wealth goes to the business and the county wealth, but is that any element of it?

We don't do that.

I don't know that we're, are we forbidden to do it?

You're right.

Yeah.

Local references are prohibited under federal

Contractual requirements in our documents.

These are our goals.

And look, I don't want, what the team does, they reach out, we have, you know, Meet the Prime, so Long Bridge North is huge, huge contract, Long Bridge North, huge contract.

We get those vendors out there and have Meet the Prime meetings.

It recently was a couple of weeks ago, Jerrica, yes, a couple of weeks ago.

where we have small businesses come in and say, look, here's what I can do, Long Bridge North, how can I help you?

So we are really engaged in that whole part of the industry.

With that, are there any other questions or discussion on this topic?

Then I would ask for a motion to approve our DBE and SWAM goals for fiscal year 2026.

So moved.

Thank you, Mr. Payne.

Second.

Thank you, Mr.

Flowers.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

And that completes the Executive Director's report.

Thank you, DJ.

We will move to agenda item number nine with an update to our Board Management Reserve.

Good morning.

My name is Selma Nemanovic and I am the FP&A Senior Manager and I'm going to walk you through the Board Management Reserve today.

Since there are a few new board members with us today, I would like to provide a few key points on the purpose of the Management Reserve.

The Management Reserve is calculated as the net difference between plant sources, which are the revenues,

and the uses, which are the expenses in the financial plan through completion of our capital projects, which is fiscal year 31.

It provides a buffer against increases in the expenses or decreases in the revenues.

And it is important to know that the reserve is not set aside in a separate bank account, rather it is an accounting exercise that we do on a quarterly basis.

As I just mentioned, the Management Reserve is updated on a quarterly basis based on reasonably no changes to the sources or the uses.

And it is presented to the Board for approval at the next Board meeting.

Please note that the Board approves the use of the Management Reserve.

It's important to note that VPRA has over 42 distinct revenue sources, and there's a handful of them that are variable, which could cause an impact to the management process.

If you take a look at the top section of the PowerPoint, these are some of the changes to those variable revenue sources that happened in fiscal year 25.

The first one is investment income.

We had an increase of $11.7 million in investment income from

when compared to the budgeted amount.

The Commonwealth Rail Fund increased by $2.5 million, and the operating revenue use also increased by $4.8 million.

These were offset by a decrease of $0.4 million in the access fees.

So this had to do an increase in our sources of $8.6 million.

There were no changes in the uses since the last coordinating up to July 26th, or June 26th.

So our total increase to the management reserve of $18.6 million puts our management reserve at $71 million.

If you look on the right, it just kind of shows the progress of the management reserve.

Currently, as I just mentioned, we stand to get the management reserve approved at $71 million.

which will help offset the increases of the costs in our program.

As you can tell in the graph to the left, there's 26% of our program that still requires construction pricing.

So part of this management reserve will be used to cover any changes in the construction pricing.

Okay, so that's one and I think you're doing a fabulous job and I think you probably miss Shannon more than anyone else in this room, but thank you for doing this.

What is 5%?

What's the number right now that would be 5%?

But the 5% would be the $270 million.

Okay, so if I could see that, it's on the slide.

Thank you.

Oh yes, we need to approve that.

Any other questions or discussion?

Go ahead, Steve.

Yeah, that's what I was going to do.

Just making sure nobody else had any other questions before we move forward.

Okay, I would ask for a motion to approve the management reserve balance as presented.

Second.

Thank you, Pat.

Second.

Sorry, I wasn't sure who.

Thank you, Ms. Drake.

Second.

All in favor.

Aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

Management reserve balance is approved.

And with that, we'll move to agenda item number 10.

And I believe for the Amtrak agreement overview, we may not be hearing from Ashwini.

We may be hearing from Jeremy Latimer.

Thank you.

That Sweeney wasn't able to make today.

Hopefully it's being here soon.

She's the manager of our 209 contract with Amtrak.

And so today, what I want to go through is you're going to hear words like PREA, 209, secrecy, all those sorts of things.

And some of the board members have seen this, but it's good for a refresher for everybody.

So when we say PREA 209, that's what we call the agreement that Virginia has with Amtrak for the state supported service.

They also have the long distance service that runs through Virginia.

And so under section 209 of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008, it says that any routes less than 750 miles must be paid for by the states.

So that was a change.

And as of 2013, a number of routes that would have ceased to exist were actually taken over by states in order to keep them running.

And so that affected Virginia.

And so when you look at this map and how Amtrak operates all the way down the Northeast corridor, what we do is pull

Northeast Regional Trains that operate on Amtrak's Northeast Corridor into Virginia.

So the light blue lines that you see there are the routes over which we have Virginia State supported service.

And you can also see the VRE service in Northern Virginia there, just for some context as well, because the Northern Virginia area is the most congested because VRE and Amtrak and CSX and Northern Southern all coming in to that area together.

So just another view of our service.

through this.

So everything in Navy Blue is what we pay for under our PREA-209 agreement.

That is the Virginia, in fact, Virginia service, PREA-209 service under that agreement.

So it's eight daily round trips and under the Transforming Rail in Virginia program, that will grow to 13 daily round trips once we finish our capital improvement program.

We also have, you see the Carolinian Blue, the North Carolina train that comes through Virginia.

And then we also have

the six daily round trips on the Amtrak long distance service.

And that goes far and wide, but it all comes through Virginia.

So for example, the Department of Service goes off to Chicago.

You can see through Danville, the Crescent, that goes on its way to North, New Orleans.

And then we have other services that can see South and South Carolina and Florida.

So a lot of, a lot of options for folks.

And I think what's important when you look at this, we look at it color coded.

You look at what our service is.

We do a lot of work to say, you know, let's optimize the ridership and revenue.

But when people book their ticket, they're booking the train that works for them, right?

So they don't necessarily see this color coded map and they're booking their tickets and we want to be cognizant of that as we're looking to plan track on our partnerships.

So when you're part of the pre-109 club, so other states signed into the 209 agreements as well, there's a methodology that lays out how we share costs and so the states will, for example, pay proportional share at Staples Mill Station because some of that serves as long distance, some of it state supported.

and then there's also the Carolinians.

We don't pay a hundred percent of the staff cost there.

So that all falls under 209, the PREA methodology.

20 state agencies are part of that club.

Congress funded us as a group to work together.

So when Amtrak made this shift, their cost, their systems were not set up to share those costs with the states.

So there's been a lot of work since 2013 in order to

Understand where the costs are going, cost buckets, and make sure that we're right on these things, that there's transparency, that we understand the rates that we're paying, that they're accurate, and they've been updated.

So a lot of work happens in that group that we call state receive.

And so that is really our foundation.

That 209 agreement in that group is our foundation of how we work through a lot of the foreigner issues together with other states.

So this is just a little bit about, say, proceed through all they develop and refine that policy, keep it up to date, we vote, keep it current.

And then Virginia, under that agreement, we can manage our revenues.

We have a lot of say over our customer experience and our staffing levels.

We get to determine our schedules and an added layer for Virginia under our TRV, our Transforming Rail in Virginia agreement.

All of our services have to continue into the Northeast Corridor unless Virginia opts otherwise.

So we have that option as well.

And then of course we have our equipment levels and our service levels that are under our purview because of this agreement.

And then we have Amtrak quarterly meetings, which are highly orchestrated by a Schweeny and they are always about our priorities and our partnerships.

Just one, you said it, but I just want to put a final point on it.

All of our, under agreement, all of our services have to connect to the Northeast Corridor on a 1C ride.

So you get on a train in Roanoke, Newport News, Norfolk, Richmond, you can go all the way to New York without having to change trains in New York, in Washington, DC, if you don't want to.

And it's very important because under the PREA methodology, we get 100% of the revenue between Washington DC and any of the points in Virginia.

But if we get that revenue minus a per passenger mile charge on the Northeast quarter, so we still get funding from the Northeast quarter of being able to pay a cost to be on Amtrak's revenue.

And so the 209 agreement gave us a lot of other opportunities too.

And so what I wanted to just mention, and you'll see more about this,

The passenger information display systems, or PIDs for short, are what you see when you go to a station and it talks about your train and when it's arrival and departure time and any updates at that screen.

And so recently, about a year ago, I guess, those who are familiar with Ashland Station or Fredericksburg Station would know that

In Fredericksburg, you might be on one side of the tracks looking at the screen and there may not have been a track assignment or the track assignment was wrong.

And so you would run down the ramp and underneath and run back up.

And there's always that panic.

We had that as a VPRA, the entire group had to do that.

Ashland was a more dangerous situation where people would wait in the middle of the tracks in order to see they're looking this way, unaware of any trains coming behind them, looking to see which side they need to be on as the train approaches.

And this went on for years.

And so.

Through our 209 agreement, we have worked with Amtrak to find a fix for this.

So we've installed updated passenger information displays at Ashland, also at Main Street Station.

And then the VRE system is the newer VRE system.

It's at Fredericksburg, and we also have Staples Mill.

And we are paying through our 209 agreement for staff at Staples Mill to track the trains and update those screens accurately.

for safety and customer experience.

And so this has so far been a big success.

There's a lot of return for the investment here.

We see this kind of as a short-term fix because this is a nationwide issue.

We're kind of the first state that has delved into this to fix this, and we'll be showing this to other states, but we've already had conversations with Amtrak that we need to see a national solution.

One thing, in case you're wondering which trains are ours, where are they at?

R. There's a capital R. That's for regional.

So if you want to help us with the cost recovery that Steve mentioned, take it to the ones with an R. But they're also on time at a more frequent basis because they go shorter routes.

Obviously, if you want a long route for it to New York or Boston, that's good.

Chances are, that's going to be less on time.

So one on time.

That's interesting.

I didn't know that.

Why don't the cam track would love that?

Virginia would.

I'll say, knowing that this system is in place is a great benefit to a father with three teenage girls who's had to run from one track to the other with multiple bags.

Obviously, quite a task.

Rail enthusiasts around the state, and we have rail cams, and they are watching.

And we get emails about the planning course and a few times in the beginning when it didn't.

There's no action item on this one, but thank you very much.

Great update.

And with that, we are a little bit early on our schedule, but we're going to go ahead and break for lunch.

And because lunch is going to be here around noon, hopefully a little bit before, so everyone can

Use the restroom ahead of time.

And if it's okay with everybody, I would like to start back a little bit earlier.

When are we supposed to come back?

At one o'clock?

Do you have time?

Discussing whether we should go ahead and get the closed session done.

If you think we have time, I would say let's do it.

Mike, you okay with that?

Okay, switching gears.

Oh, perfect.

All right.

Madam Vice Chair, Drake, would you mind reading us?

Yeah, I move that the board being in a closed session pursuant to Virginia Code 2.23711A29,

for the discussions of public contracts relating to VPRAs Transforming Rail in Virginia projects involved in the expenditure of public funds, including discussion of the terms or scope of such contracts where discussion in an open session would adversely affect the bargaining position and negotiating strategy of VPRAs.

Second.

Thank you, Ms. Rhinehart.

All in favor of moving into closed session?

Thank you.

All opposed?

Making sure there's nothing else I need.

We're going to call this meeting back to order after our lunch session and move right into agenda item 13.

Service Performance Updates.

Super.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

And yes, Jeremy will come up, but earlier today we shared a lot of good news and I told you ahead of time that it's not all going to be good news.

And I just wanted to preface.

Look, we've got a lot of projects.

We talked about coordination that has to take place.

And what we need to do as an authority is make sure that the momentum that we have earned

And the ridership that we have gained, people ride the train not only because they're there, but because they're on time, they're reliable, they're safe, they're a positive experience.

And as we move into construction, we want to make sure that all of that continues, even as we've got to make changes.

So Jeremy is going to talk about some of the challenges at Union Station,

with On-Time Performance, some of the challenges that we've had with Amtrak getting crews in the right place, locomotives that are perhaps not as available as we'd like them to be.

So I just want to

to take some of the bad news this way and not just say, hey, Jeremy, we're gonna throw you to the wolves if you've got all this bad news.

The good news is that we've watched this closely.

Jeremy's talked to you a number of times about the performance committees that meet on a weekly basis, monthly basis, quarterly basis to look at all of the trains that are not on time, whether they're CSX, VRE, Amtrak, figure out why they weren't on time and look for ways with a no fault kind of approach to fix them and to improve the system.

We're also working very closely with those city partners to figure out what the construction period looks like for Long Bridge and for 4th Track because in order to get those projects done by 2030, we're going to see some disruption in the current train service.

In fact, Terri and I will tell you, we currently have eight states for the trains.

That is likely going to drop to seven, starting in January with one being replaced by a bus.

Again, we're finalizing those conversations now.

We'll have a final plan for you at the October 7th meeting.

Theory folks have been great.

Amtrak's been great.

CSX has been great.

We all know that there's going to be some pain before we get the nirvana and all these projects being done.

We need to make sure, all of us together, that that pain is as minimal as possible and that we don't lose any of the positive momentum that we've had in passenger rail over the next few years.

So that's our focus every day.

Just wanted to preface what Jeremy has to say.

And of course, happy to have any conversations.

Jeremy, anything I said that defends you?

You would tell me if I did.

Jeremy, go ahead.

Okay.

So, I'm trying to find what we're looking at, coming to the Long Bridge favorite construction, particularly Long Bridge North Act, which is the one that's going to affect the business.

The reason we're looking at the sub-farmations and sort of that description.

So, because of the

The District of Columbia's Noise and Vibration restrictions.

There is work on the Long Bridge that should not be done tonight.

It has to be done today.

So from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. And so as we started to look at that, what that means for our service, we recognized, and especially right now, as people are back to work in DC, the VRA ridership is up.

And so we're finding reserve to protect as much of the ridership as possible, be that in Virginia or Amtrak.

And so we went through with CSX with Amtrak, VRE, we all had several options that landed on the five hour window that will go into effect at the exact time it's still being negotiated with somewhere around 8.15 ish.

We will, the gates come down, no service to going through the Long Bridge.

I will talk about exceptions to that in a minute, but the idea is the gates come down at 8.15, the gates come back up at one o'clock.

We've been talking to Amtrak about this because Amtrak has a host of projects up to one or two that they're trying to plan for.

One of them being New York, where they have directional flow of their service going in and out at certain times of the day, which complicates, and then they're going to have trains hit our narrow little window there and what, right?

So Amtrak has said, before one o'clock, few minutes before one o'clock, we're releasing trains southbound to Virginia.

So that gate has to come up.

I wouldn't have thought the trains are on their way already.

So it's been a lot of coordination.

So just as a reminder that we're going to talk about the Virginia State supported service primarily in this, the long distance service is still being negotiated, the VRE service is still being negotiated, but these are the services, the Amtrak Virginia services that we're looking at going from 8 daily round trips to 7 daily round trips and then putting in some bus services as well.

So what's the timeline to when this all starts?

So one of the things that we're turning back online, it's very set up in September, it comes back online.

You're going to hear me, riders tend for a small fee, get on the train.

We'll talk about something about maybe expanding that as we go into the final years of the first Long Bridge, but that's a good development to get the flexibility of the riders.

I'm just going to let him get through this, what he says.

So on October 8th is our goal to implement changes in the reservation system.

So one of our strategies is not to scare riders away, right?

The service is still going to run.

So we just wanted to take some trains out of the system where we booked up the train.

So by October 8th, in anticipation of the January changes, we were trying to get

Aldi, Sandy Bushue with Amtrak 3, get bus routes procured, and get CSX no fix other die-offs so we can make changes to this system.

We are also going to talk about this in more detail.

Next slide.

We have mitigation and coordination efforts among the operators, how do we make this customer's experience well informed and as positive as possible and adjust to make sure that we have that customer perspective throughout this time period of five years.

January 8th is the target date to implement.

So the service plan begins for Amtrak and VRE, those changes are implemented.

And then from that point, from January 8th, we start on a very adjusted because what I try to get people ready for is like, we want to get it right the first time.

So I mentioned bus service.

So there's kind of aspects to this.

One of them is direct connections or what some people know as Amtrak Thruway.

So this would be that we are looking at adding some buses to target certain markets, especially out of Hampton Roads and have some of those direct buses off of Washington, DC and direct buses from Newport News to Washington, DC to those markets.

When I say those direct connections, a bus is not going to be an efficient option if it gets off the highway and goes to other stations along the way if you're looking at express routes for these buses.

But also,

We're going to be looking at the whole system, something we want to coordinate with other agencies and the VRE, but procurement is also looking at ways to enhance our options.

Since the pandemic, it has been very difficult to get buses in emergency situations where we want to get riders home by bus.

For some reason, buses and drivers disappeared.

So, we are trying to improve the situation to be able to get those on call and put in quickly good care in case that occurs.

So how do we communicate this?

Well, there's a lot of ways, a lot of talk back here, but just to kind of break it down into some buckets.

So passenger communications, one of the things we're working on with Amtrak is when you purchase your ticket, you get a pre church email.

There's going to be a lot of changes at different stations.

We want to get information to you before you even show up at the station so you know what to expect.

So we are coordinating with Amtrak on what the timelines are for us to get that information secured or to confirm with project managers that the schedule is staying on schedule so that we don't put something out there that is accurate.

And then we also just want general awareness that the schedules are changing.

So that's part of it as well.

And then when we get these updates, or the more immediate, so we want text updates to come out.

Yuri is very good with this.

There are passengers.

Amtrak has gotten better at it over recent years, but we want to get text updates out in the moment to let people know what to do.

We also want those display systems and stations and announcements at the stations and announcements on board to tell people what's going on.

And we're looking around the country at where some things like we know in Illinois they had a partner dust campaign where they had some announcements made on the board as you're going through certain areas.

Say right now you're going through a construction area that will be an additional track or whatever will increase speeds or capacity.

So we're looking at partnering with Amtrak for that sort of approach.

And then the public awareness piece.

So what you see here is a picture from Washington Union Station where they had, we probably wouldn't do some things

White, this large, but we want the opportunity to put things in our stations to tell people about the Transforming Rail in Virginia story so that they're aware of the stations.

And then Amtrak, you know, has invested 944 million dollars into Transforming Rail in Virginia.

The Amtrak National Marketing Team, so we kind of have our own marketing efforts that we coordinate with Amtrak National, but we want them to promote awareness of our project as well.

Fund is defying bigger markets, people from the North East who are coming into DC.

And since they're investing so heavily in our program, we feel this is something that they should also be advertising awareness for.

So we're planning to partner with them.

VRE is developing their plans as well.

Sure.

So one thing that we're looking at, probably more than just looking at, we started off with a bunch of different options and stuff, but for example, you know, our service,

primarily comes out of our southern jurisdictions in the morning and works our way north.

So if you remember back to the slide where I think the first slide where Jeremy had that timeframe up there,

It's a little bit after eight o'clock.

That's about, we have our last couple of trains come into Union Station after nine o'clock.

So what we're looking at doing, we'll continue to operate those trains, but we'll truncate them at Alexandria.

So in other words, we'll run them up to Alexandria.

It'd be approximately the last two trains.

Run them up to Alexandria and then reverse them back into the recently acquired seminary yard and start utilizing that facility

and essentially store those trains there.

And then we're looking at, we have a midday service, one train on both lines that comes out of Washington Union Station in the afternoon.

And frankly, it's a key train for us, not necessarily in terms of ridership, but it's sort of that safety valve for people that if they need to get on an early, early train, sick kid at school, something like that,

that we need to be able to give them that.

So we're working on a creative way to keep that service operating as well.

And then of course, you see the rest of the timeline there.

Same thing, similar to what Jeremy was talking about, communication, communication, communication, communication.

Our passengers, they want some sense of predictability, even if it's not,

the preferred option, if you will.

In other words, maybe not for those last two trains, a one seat ride into Washington Union Station or Lafont, which is actually our busiest station.

But if we get out ahead of time, tell them what's going on and communicate with them, then they can adjust to that.

And then the other thing I just want to, you know, just from a little bit higher level, and DJ touch to most of these points here, but

You know, the next five years with the projects that are going on in this segment of this corridor, and again, these are projects, you've got CSX constructing track, you've got, you know, VPRA out there managing a new Long Bridge, you've got VRE out there doing station improvements and stuff like that.

We cannot underscore enough

You know, the safety aspect of it.

We've got, we're going to have folks up and down this eight mile corridor, eight mile bridge out in the right of way working.

And we need to give them a safe working, you know, safe working window there as well.

So I just wanted to emphasize that this is, you know, just kind of, kind of imagine that if, if the focus wasn't there and the focus is there from the safety perspective, but if it wasn't,

To go over the next three to four to five years and have safety issues out there, that would not bode well for any of our collective organizations.

So I think this is very smart.

This is something that needs to be done.

And by going, I'm going to emphasize again, go back to what Jeremy said, but we've got to continue to coordinate, collaborate and communicate.

So I'm sure there's some marketing line in there that I just came up with.

But we have to do that.

And so by the time we get to the other end of this, back in the, you know, in the 2030-ish timeframe or whatever, we not only have the infrastructure out there, but we haven't lost all of our passengers.

So there you have it.

I think the VRE, yes, the shuttle coming back in Virginia, sending less trains in the Union Station is a very big piece of it.

for Virginia State supported service schedule changes and reducing by one for long distance service.

You know, Amtrak is taking some pain on that as well as they are having to change those schedules, which have changed considerably in some cases where the markets for their furthest reaches of longer routes are changing too, sort of paying the passenger ridership revenue.

So everybody's taking some pain in this, but everybody and then Ian, and then the Long Bridge team, and then Charlene, and then that whole team, we went out to Amtrak

Because there was some additional, like, does it have to be this disruptive, right?

We had to do our homework and convince them, and they had their engineers there, and they have bought in, and that's why they're working on the sketch to this.

Can I ask a question?

And maybe it's for Rich.

You're going to end some of the RE trains in Alexandria.

Are you working with WMATA?

I'm sorry.

Are you working with WMATA?

Are they just going to take the train in?

Yes, I should have brought that up, but yeah, that's one of the reasons why we, as we model this, one of the reasons why it makes sense to just go ahead and truncate those couple of trains in Alexandria is because there is, you know, the King Street Station right there for WMATA.

Still exploring some ideas as far as, you know, how to cross-honor them, if that's important.

In other words, how to get them onto, you know, WMATA from a

from a fair perspective, how to make that a little bit more transparent.

That might not, there's actually a couple ideas, but that hasn't been solidified.

And nothing is changing.

A lot is aligned over the Potomac River right there too.

How's that going to work for ticketing?

Will they be, they'll buy their Amtrak ticket to Alexandria and then they'll buy your ticket?

Right, well that's what I mean.

So currently they'll have a VRE ticket and then they'll have to get a metro.

Again, best case, it increases all of our business simply because we're being predictable about what we're doing, right?

It'll be a little bit of an interruption.

And I think for people that know VRE passengers, VRE passengers are, are looking over at a couple of VRE passengers in the room.

They're very much creatures of habit.

And so we got to get through that.

We got to get through that mindset.

There's going to be a little bit of a change.

Hopefully, you know, we provide you something that works for you and then you make adjustments, we'll make adjustments and we'll go get the work done.

If someone currently is used to going into DC every morning on a train, on an Amtrak train, a Virginia Amtrak train, that goes right through that construction window, and if that train is going to go away for this short period of time,

Amtrak will lose some money.

In that case, that's exactly right.

So make this even more complicated.

Jeremy, go to the slide where you showed the step-up tickets since we're kind of talking about that.

So previous to COVID, we had a cross-owner agreement with Amtrak.

So VRE passengers that have multi-ride tickets from a small fee, if you will, can purchase a step-up ticket and ride on an Amtrak train.

Typically in our service area, they're used as more express trains.

So the folks in Fredericksburg, very popular to get on a couple of these, you know, a couple of these Amtrak trains that are going through the territory at the time.

So it's very key that we, so we're reinstating that program with Amtrak.

In fact, while we were sitting here, I just got the final letter agreement.

So hopefully we can do that as early as next week.

So a lot of different things happening, give people some choices, some options.

And with the mindset, and I want to say while we've been discussing this for the last several months,

We tried to stay focused on how can we best, given the construction windows out there, how can we best just simply move people?

How can we move people?

It's not about moving trains here, it's about moving people.

And just like we, a lot of us wear different hats, we're gonna probably ask our passengers to wear slightly different, or a few different hats in some circumstances as well.

I just had a quick question about, we're not at 2026 on this map.

But even further on into the year, we have some major events on year 26.

We talked about America 250.

Are we planning to actually think about, hey, does it actually make sense to

either reduce work or stop work so that we can actually get up to even peak or even enhance service during those windows because we know that we're gonna have a lot of even one-time only VPRA passengers during that peak season.

We worked with Amtrak quite a bit.

What we found is, we did an analysis of several years of ridership boom and bust periods, right, and wanted to try and preserve service.

To bring people back and bring trains back for shorter amounts of time is very difficult and probably going to be inconsistent.

We did get them to agree to the peak times around the holidays, the end of the year.

But we're also going to stop work because CSX also has very traffic.

And so I guess that there's so much to think about with all this.

I would say when it comes to, you know, the 13-250 and what's coming, kind of the culmination of what's already underway.

And then we have, you know, Easter and Spring Break and other times of the year where we see people ridership.

We work with Amtrak.

every two weeks on ridership and revenues.

And so we kind of have these charts by route that we look like we lean heavy, we need more riders.

We're trying to balance this between leaning heavy towards revenue because we think we can try seeing ridership, you know, so we don't want to give away revenue.

But we also are very aware that the challenge this year is to shift people who might've taken the trains that are not operating, shift them to other trains or to the bus options.

So

So you can explain some of that.

Newport News will stay at the same service level.

Only Norfolk will be affected, but we're looking at capturing

or riders with buses that are express.

So as of January 8th, there would be two trains to Norfolk and there would be two trains to Newport News.

And then there'd be one bus to each of them.

So only one train is going away.

We're going from eight states for the trains to seven.

Well, that's what I heard was heard eight to seven.

So it's only one train.

So it's only the Norfolk train going away.

And it will be the, have you really looked, I need to explain back home why you made this decision.

So, and it was surprising to me to just learn it last week, this was all happening.

Right, we're finalizing the plans now with V-Ray with Amtrak.

We are going to make sure that by the next board meeting and by the 8th, October 8th, when this would become real in the reservation system, that we meet with all the local leaders, that we make sure that no prior to the 8th.

Weeks before that.

We have briefed Secretary Miller on multiple occasions at a high level on this.

That was a big deal in Norfolk to get train service after not having train service since 72.

So it's going to be a big deal, even though it's just one train now.

I thought it was going to be two trains, one out of Newport News and one out of Norfolk.

So Newport News is okay.

Is there any way to shift that Norfolk train so that it leaves or give people the option, let them weigh in how they'd like to see it?

Would they like to leave earlier in the morning and still have their

Under the current schedule, which isn't final, there's a 4.30 in the morning train that leaves from Newport News.

And when we looked at it, it didn't make sense to have a four o'clock train and a 4.30 from the same area.

Really, any train that was going through that work window in that period, we had to look at either moving

or substituting with a bus.

And the Beery ridership is big.

They're taking a big hit stopping in Alexandria.

When we looked at it, it didn't make sense to move another Norfolk train earlier.

It made more sense to during a time of the day when people wanted to ride, to put a bus in there that

I want to say conveniently, but we planned it this way.

It would be able to take advantage of the hot lands going north, so it would still be time competitive.

As we've talked about, you get to Fredericksburg, you could be there for a long time.

We don't want to put people on a bus that's incredibly unreliable.

And Hampton Roads bridge tunnel is one of the components.

All the way through.

Okay.

You know, going through, again, the awareness campaign, very important.

right, just in the stations, on social media, asking Amtrak to help us promote our, you know, not just relying on our Amtrak Virginia accounts, but Amtrak national accounts, Amtrak advertisements, wherever we can encounter both so we ride our trains.

So I wanted to go over, you know, we're doing a lot of mitigation and communication planning.

We do want to have contingency plans because as we go through a minute of our service performance, you know, we have room for improvement and we're only going to make that harder for

So we need to be ready for what that means.

We need to be ready to say, you know, if, you know, the VRA S schedule is always an option.

We don't want to implement that option, but we know there's a fallback plan to reduce service if for some reason the station can't handle all this or Long Bridge, if something happens, we're asking Amtrak to come up with that as well.

Cross honoring something that we're talking about that's different than VRA step up.

One of the things VRA step up has done though,

is get Amtrak to, it's now digital, right?

You don't have to pay per ticket anymore.

So there is this ability for two hours before the train departs to turn on the ability for people from VRE to reserve a ticket.

More capabilities now to implement this because of the new way that it's done.

So we want to try and make that work.

I think I have a slide on that.

Nope, nope.

So if you're going to Fredericksburg from Washington DC,

You can take an Amtrak train, that could be a Virginia train, that could be a North Carolina train, that could be a long distance train, or it could be a VRE.

So it's not just about VRE getting on Amtrak.

If Amtrak could get on VRE to get home, we want that speed to work as well.

And so then, of course, we would also have some cars that are not in operation on our service because we would have to have more conductors, but we were looking at opening those cars as we try to shift and price appropriately to get people to take the train.

that is still in service.

And then I'm going to go in a little bit about service level reporting on a piece of this that we were working on with our consultant team.

So this shows the font board track Long Bridge North, which is the most disruptive project to service, Alexandria board track, Franklin and all of the projects that we have that are entering construction from 2025 to 2028.

And what you see in red there circled is the summer of 2027.

The summer of 2027,

Just about every project is under construction, but every project is also shifting its construction phase, which means that things are going to be changing.

Certain tracks come out of service, certain boards come out of service.

So there's a lot to track here.

So we want to stay informed for project teams because those little white lines in the red box can move depending on how construction goes.

They find something or they stay ahead of schedule, whatever the case may be.

So watching this through the entire five years of Long Bridge construction and

Well, we're looking at the entire corridor holistically.

So this might be a little hard to see, but what we're looking at is out the Alexandria corridor.

So you can see Alexandria Station, Crystal City, CSX Long Bridge up to the bottom.

And this is Alexandria corridor phase 4C of construction.

You don't have to know all the different phases.

All you just need to know is by this phase of construction, if you're familiar with Alexandria Station, you usually board on track three next to the station building, or you cross the tracks over to the other side.

Both of those platforms are out of service.

Both of those tracks are out of service.

So we're concerned about riders showing up at the last minute and all of a sudden everything's changed, right?

And there's going to be temporary platforms on the other tracks now.

And so we need to get those creature emails out there.

We need to get text updates out there.

We need awareness in stations for regular riders.

We need all these things to be firing on all of their cylinders so that we can keep customers informed.

The other thing is GRE is looking at some things like

You wouldn't have a shuttle train coming out of Bingham Station.

If you're a VRE rider, get on this train.

We'll get to Alexandria and we'll shuffle trains once you're down there.

What we need to make sure is that that operation still works with a smaller temporary platform.

So that when we get down there, we don't have a platform big enough for one train.

So there's a lot of logistics to think through every stage of construction for every project.

And that's where we're trying to do our best to not miss anything.

I have a quick question.

It sounds like we have a plan in place to provide regular updates and be really transparent about the actual work that's coming.

But are we also finding a way to communicate that the end result, to let customers know that, you know, no different than any road construction project.

There's a little pain while there's road construction, but it's going to be worth it in the end because this is what you're going to get.

And I want to speak for Jericho, but that is the goal of some of those materials about awareness.

Okay.

This is coming, but this is exciting because it's going to be better.

Yeah, we're connecting it to Transforming Rail in Virginia.

We're keeping some of the videos we saw today and showing them the construction work that's happening.

So integrating our communications that we're doing to folks who were just left in their neighborhoods, some of that same communication like

You'll experience a little pain, you'll hear a little noise.

The schedule is changing, so not emphasizing the schedule differences, but saying the schedule is changing, but ultimately it's what you're getting, a better quality high performance rail service, and then showing something.

The next five years, so that's 13 rounds for today.

Thank you.

Right, perfect.

More of your retraction.

Okay, before June moves on,

Back in May and June, we briefed the board on Long Bridge pricing and phase two of the agreements for Long Bridge North to transfer flat irons.

Michael West was probably asking me every day, where do we stay with port windows?

As he is negotiating the Long Bridge North contract, where do we stay with port windows?

Because without that five hour window, scheduling the cost would have been much further to the right than a bad bus.

So it was very important that, so he was working with the negotiating team, I'm working with Jeremy, we'll work with CSX, Amtrak, and V to V to get that work done.

Otherwise, instead of the 2030 long bridge day, the contractor might have been very well ahead of us a couple of years out.

Also might have added, we had our low and our high for Long Bridge that we showed on the board, much like we did for the four track in the post session earlier.

It would have been beyond the high level if we didn't have them for work, but that was very important to them.

discounts for five and a half, that work window, because keep in mind, Rich, you mentioned safety reasons.

If you have a potential to follow a track, you can't have a train through if you have a potential to follow a track.

And if we have to keep moving the equipment away, we're never gonna get that job done.

So you have other tracks that might be out of service, but the tracks that need to have a train go through, again, potential to follow,

Incorrect means something else we're hanging or even close to it, you have to be quite many feet away from that track.

So I'm just wondering to emphasize that all the work that was done to get to that June board budget decision for FY26 was predicated on the work windows that Jeremy and team have been working on.

It's a good thing to also, that I mentioned this earlier, and you just reminded me that if a train shows up extremely late,

which is some of the concern of our longer-distance trains that Amtrak runs.

It's not going to have to wait for my balance.

We're going to have to let it through.

So there is going to be that cost, but there's some of that allowance built into the system.

We don't want that every day, but we have to be realistic.

Okay, so that's a good segue into on-time performance because obviously this is not going to be easy, and so how are we doing today?

So actually this one's from May, but the vehicle performance is still similar.

So, on-time performance for BRE is about 79% in July, and there have been terminal issues, terminal congestion in Washington Union Station.

There have been slow orders because CSX has maintained the right-of-way.

That has actually been wrapping up in the last couple of months, so that should be getting better.

Is there anything you wanna say about BRE service?

Obviously, we're in a different place, currently,

and a different place on a positive note.

And DJ mentioned activation of Track 22.

That was huge for us collectively, Amtrak and VRE.

So that just opened up at the beginning of August.

I'm not going to say the number or anything, but we only have a few more days left in August operating.

And I don't know, we're about 10 points above the number that you're saying.

Yeah, we're getting closer to it.

My point is that was huge.

That was huge.

We're seeing where terminal operations, you know, the congestion, albeit there's still some congestion, but having that additional capacity in the form of not just the rail, but the platform or it's early, but we're seeing positive effect of that.

So it's not all negative information, but

For us, that number is unacceptable.

We can't stay in business with numbers that are that low.

And just to make sure everybody's reminded, like the red is for the delay from the Fredericksburg line, the blue, the delay of the NASA's line.

We're looking at the top 10 delays.

We're looking at, this is what our service performance committees are focusing on.

We're not looking for one-offs that are going to happen today that doesn't happen frequently, that we want to be prepared for after learning experiences, but we're looking for the frequent,

and the impact.

So we look for what's happening frequently and what is the impact.

And so in red again, Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg line is doing versus the Manassas line.

So that's that chart and that shelf.

So moving on to the Virginia State Supported Service or the Amtrak Regional Services.

So we are, you can see the line, we're down to 52.6% on all station on type of parts, which looks at trains arriving, not the percentage of the customers, but

That's about where we were this time last year.

This is kind of our summer slump.

There's a lot of construction that happens in summer and a lot of heat orders, a lot of things, but I'm going to talk about some other challenges as well.

When you look at over on the right-hand side, the trains that are performing the best, those are usually those morning northbound trains before we have any of the heat of the day slowing things down.

And then the congestion in the UDA station starts to build throughout the day.

And we also have the heat orders.

from the later parts of the day.

And so the trains and the cell phone or the afternoon trains tend to perform much worse.

Just a reminder for everybody, heat orders, so every, every rover has the heat order policy, but CSX is one of the more conservative ones.

And so if the temperature reaches by 85 degrees, they can slow the trains down.

If the ambient temperature or the rails reach 110 degrees, they can slow things down.

If there's a temperature swing of 40 degrees, say in the shoulder season, spring or fall, they can also slow things down.

So when CSX implements a heat order, it goes into effect from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m., which means from that time forward, our schedule is not going to be achieved.

And I will go over how frequent that happens in the summertime on the eastern side of the state.

Norfolk Southern

has a much less conservative heat order policy, but I will say in June and July, towards the end of the month, we had extremely hot days in Norfolk Southern who doesn't usually put in heat orders the way CSX does, did, and it slowed things down drastically, thanks to 25 knots per hour for the days, the three days that that happened in both June and the three days in July.

So looking at the long distance trains, long distance, or long distance, they have more opportunities to have their service interrupted or messed up.

They typically perform worse than our shorter Virginia trains, Virginia routes.

But a long distance, about 34, we're saying all station on time performance.

And then we rank the long distance trains.

These are again, are the ones that are not Virginia trains.

The one that we have started really focused on with Amtrak, Floridian.

Floridian replaced the Silver Star.

So it goes from Florida and you scope to the Northeast corridor because of construction.

The Northeast corridor, they actually shifted that route over to Chicago, became the Floridian for the time being.

The interesting thing about the Floridian that I really want to understand, because there's a long route of traffic happening to it, but they have a lot of cushion built in at Union Station.

They keep it on diesel the whole time, so it does not have an engine switch like all of our other trains, yet it still comes in a Virginia extreme plate.

So we need to understand what's going on there.

This train is one of the poorest performers.

As a matter of fact, the first time it was on time in its entire existence, everybody celebrated.

It has the most sense.

So Union Station I want to talk about.

So Union Station is like, I think I've asked before is when you think about what is the major challenge for our on-time performance in Virginia, typically people say brain interference.

And it is responsible for a lot, but it is actually not the most important.

And we're looking at the

The trend, the data told us actually it's coming out of Union Station, Amtrak Control and Union Station has been our challenge.

And so you can see last summer, and this is about to fall off the chart, but this was a long period before leading up to July 2024, where we started to see in the data that Union Station is not functioning well.

And you're sending trains into Virginia extremely late, and that includes VRE.

And so we really started working with Amtrak on this and they came up with a hiring plan, they had a crew shortage, they still have engine change issues, a lot of things going on in the station.

If you ever get up there in the summertime and you just spend some time in the afternoon on the platform, it is chaos.

But they implemented a plan and we started to see those delays come down significantly very quickly over the months.

So you see July, 2024, we peaked at 4,500 minutes and by November, we were down to a thousand and it has oscillated a little bit up and down, but it has not gone back up to where it is.

Continuous improvement at Amtrak to try and push that down even further because that means a lot for us to change strategy.

If we can expect trains coming out of Union Station on time into Virginia, now we can lean more heavily on CSX and north and southern to make sure that those trains get the rest of the way on time.

I will say crew issues have popped up.

So there was a shortage of crew issues in July.

Servicing is just getting the train ready to get out the door.

There's been some delays changing the engines.

Freddie, and getting them into the station from the yard.

We have seen an uptick in mechanical issues.

And I don't know, I think there's some folks who experienced some delays due to this, but Amtrak is aware and this came up at their Amtrak board meeting recently.

They are running on an aging fleet and the issues are becoming

More numerous and more impactful.

So Amtrak is working on a fleet management plan.

They're working on answering some questions for the operator, for the states that are contracting with different operations.

But this isn't a problem we need to handle.

Because when it happens, it can be very disruptive.

And then, you know, when we talk about Amtrak and its congestion at Jeaning Station, one of those who are affected

So looking at the top line, the Fredericksburg trains, you can see that earlier in the day, 1300 point clock doing well, but then going into the afternoon, you can start to see that the late departure is in red.

You can even start to see some of the cancellations for short-term happening in gray.

Same thing for the Manassas Line trains as you go throughout the day, it's getting worse.

Pretty much tells the story right there.

And then there are times where you will just not send trains into Union Station because there are trains being held outside Union Station because... Short-term the trains, I mean, there's no sense of adding to the congestion.

And I guess one thing I will just mention that, or Jeremy, you mentioned the Floridian, 40 and 41, that is a abnormally long train.

And when it gets stuck in Washington Union Terminal for any extended period of time, and for some reason,

It always gets stuck in the afternoon in that terminal, so it's not easy for them to deal with or manage.

So any way we can get that pushed out.

Well, actually, if those trains could operate on time, everything would be just perfect.

I'm gonna talk a little bit more about weather.

So we've been tracking this because

We've been adjusting the schedule in the summertime to try and mitigate the impact of the hot days, especially on the border enrichment in Washington DC.

So as you can see, if you look at June and July, in the red is 2025 delays, especially not been as many heat order days as there was last year, which I guess is good news.

But we did have really hot days that were really disruptive to service and so hot that it affected the Norfolk Southern side, which we have not actively been tracking.

though we are starting that now.

And so, you know, even having a few days can be a very disruptive service and hurt overall on time.

These charts I know are very busy, so let's talk through a bunch of them.

But on the left side are the days that we've seen heat order.

So if it's in the orange, either the minor where we had a few heat orders reported or we had frequent heat order delays reported on our trains, you can see the number of days starting in June all the way through to the end of July.

A lot of them, a lot of people, right?

The days that we have them are there from 7 o'clock to 7 o'clock, there's no chance of our schedule.

So that's why we added time.

And you can see the, on the right hand side, you can see the, by train, we don't necessarily have to worry about where these trains fit, except that they were operating during the heat order times.

And you can see the bar chart shows

The delays incurred, the heat orders, the diamonds, the amount of time we built into the schedule.

So the intent was not to completely wipe out heat orders because at that point we're just slowing the train down to a ridiculous amount and there are other delays.

And if you have a day where it's cooler, like this August has been extremely cool, heat order schedules are still in place.

So there are going to be days where you see probably like train 94 there where the diamond is beyond the delays and we don't want trains just sitting around.

We're not slowing them down too much, but we're trying to absorb some of the viewers that we're expecting based on the data from the past few years.

So we will do an assessment of this after September and report back on how we did and adjust reporting.

Any questions on performance?

Sorry.

I just want to ask this question before the dual

Group of Locomotives, both electric and diesel.

Yes.

Well, they did.

They have been ordered.

The first one, I think a month ago, came off the assembly line and went to the Northeast border for testing.

The first ones are promised to the Pacific Northwest.

So we are expecting to see them start showing up in Virginia in 2027.

27.

So customer service standards.

All of our trains eventually will switch over to these new aero trains.

We'll have that dual mode.

and also the push-pull.

So if there's issues coming into the stations or something, they sure don't have to do a full turnaround.

A push-pull and do a load.

Jeremy mentioned maybe they'll come in phased in.

I'm not sure how that's gonna play out.

That's gonna be a big deal, not only because it gets rid of the 12-timing, the long, long 12-timing in the station, but 45 minutes, they still need to take 20, 25 minutes to get people on and off, which can get rid of that uncertainty when they have trouble connecting or disconnecting

The diesel engine, as often happens, as Jeremy showed, that's some of the delay in the station.

They have trouble with that engine coming on and off.

So it's really going to help when those come off.

He's building his Siemens.

Yes, it's actually a big topic.

You know, the good news is because there is old equipment that is having reliability issues and there are states that need newer equipment.

We're running the entire nation on aging equipment.

The good news in Virginia is that we negotiated for that first order, which is funded, procured, and in production.

I don't know.

Yeah.

I mean, that's a big challenge here because we, over the last four decades as a country, have not ordered consistently passenger fleet.

And so we have not made as a country the investment that would get folks to come in and put facilities in.

Basically, you've got Alstom, you've got Stadler, no relationship, and then you've got Siemens.

Those are the three big ones.

And they have, but for the last decade, not seen a whole lot of business.

Even this first procurement, they had to build a factory in North Carolina.

And so we don't really have the industry or the supply chain as part of the issue we're having now.

When newer locomotives are coming online, there are issues.

We have to get parts overseas.

And so there's delays in keeping the new stuff in circulation as well.

So I could talk about that for a long time, but we're going to discuss it first, standards.

So as part of the Transforming Rail Virginia agreement with Amtrak, where they invested $944 million for that program, they have exclusivity on Amtrak Virginia services to be the provider, the operator.

But we also negotiated that we get to have a customer service standards agreement where they have to live up to certain standards for their penalties, ultimately that exclusivity can be taken away.

So that program is in its phrase period and as of October 1st will become live.

So we've been doing a lot of work here.

And what we want to emphasize, this program is not intended to be a punishment program or a gotcha program with the inspectors.

We have full-time inspector Brian Sawyer who's up in Union Station today, but we captured the positives.

because this has become a big deal for the Amtrak employees to feel good about themselves, to know that we're out there, to not figure out if we want them to know when we're on the train, we're not trying to hide some of them, but we also want there to be some rewarding and pride in operating the service in Virginia.

And we have heard some interesting stories about like, when they cross into Virginia, we've heard some that have flown to Virginia, they're a little stricter.

They know that we've done a really good job socializing the program, making sure everybody's aware.

So we have 17 standards in our program, and where they started in this program wasn't to create these standards.

We actually went to the Amtrak, it's called the Blue Book, and we said, what are your standards for yourself?

Cause they're actually already really high standards.

Problem is with the accountability piece.

So we negotiated, made sure that they were good with the language, that the managers were on board with what we were doing.

And so as we started to track this in the grace period, we're not live yet until October 1st, we started to see

is as you go from 2024 down to 2025, you'll see more green, right?

What that means is they were not compliant in a lot of the categories initially, but they're starting to become compliant.

There are two that are still not compliant, but this bar chart here on the right-hand side shows significant progress over the past year on them attaining their own standards.

They are now the point where just two of their own standards are not achieved, whereas they started with only, I think, tier four compliant when we started the grace period.

So there's been a real big change

Jeremy, if I can, I know it's hard to read because it's hard to put on a PowerPoint because it's long.

These items are such as Wi-Fi compatibility, the PA system, cleanliness, how many staff use the cafe cars, which was a problem a few years ago.

It's hard to find a cafe car.

We've limited that, things of that nature.

Again, these are online.

I know it's hard to read.

I actually have to turn my head to read them.

They said, how did you get that?

But they're very impressed.

And we're asking if other states are going to follow us.

And the answer is Jeremy does present on this.

His committee says he's on the national level.

And this is a model to follow.

And Amtrak came into this candidly very nervous about what it was going to do because they're concerned that they're going to get low scores, but their crews have embraced it.

Gary Williams, who's the chief operating officer there, and I co-signed a letter that said, look, we're not here to get people in trouble.

We're here to make sure that the passengers are getting the experience that they deserve.

And crews have really stepped up and said, you know what, I want to make sure my numbers on my train are in the green there.

I think, you know, one of the anecdotes I like to tell, there's a lot of them, but it's nothing worth frustrating trying to get out of the Wi-Fi.

But what we found is, you know, we've learned a lot about how they're upgrading the wifi systems.

We've also gone outside of that and kind of led us down a path of just coordinating with some of the providers out there and just talking to them, letting them know that this is a concern.

There were some, some improvements already because they had, they admitted to us.

We've always been dangling our antennas out towards the neighborhood.

So if we just make certain tweaks and it's like, you know, we're not investing in anything.

We're not getting grant funds for this sort of thing yet.

They've already improved certain areas of Virginia for that reception because Amtrak has invested so that there's that antenna that is searching for AT&T or Verizon or whoever's in the area to pull that signal in and distribute it better through the train.

Our inspector is then on the train checking speeds and checking from front to back.

If it's working, when he's having times where it's not working,

He's been able to report that to the conductor on board.

They try to reset it.

Sometimes that works, but sometimes it didn't.

And so then he helps them because they're busy mailing.

He reports it to Amtrak and we've been able to remotely reboot the system and get it fixed from the central office up in the Northeast.

And they've also marked those cars that have signal problems so that when they get up to the Northeast, they inspect them to make sure everything's fixed.

So that's just like one example of like one standard when we're trying to improve that reliability and that customer experience.

And then I talked a bit about the PIDS effort, but I think this one just merits talking again about that we have greatly improved the information at Richmond Main Street, Staples Mill Station, Ashland, especially the safety so that people don't wait in the middle of the tracks and then Fredericksburg as well.

And someday when there are adaptations

It's going to be upgraded to a new, we'll also dispatch or change the system from the Stable Spell Station.

That's what it is over there in the upper right hand corner of the cruise being trained.

They have, I think that's six monitors there.

It's up to eight monitors now.

And they're also making, they're watching from the cameras and they're making announcements if they see people outside as well, they're making sure that people get to the right side with as much time as they can.

And they're watching for the trains, they're departing late.

that are watching for when CSX may shift them from one track to the next.

If it sets track free and then it's on its way from Richmond to Ashland and it switched tracks, then they update that as quickly as they can.

Their goal is to have it 10 minutes before the train arrives.

So this has been a really great effort.

But as I mentioned before, we don't see this as a long-term solution because it's a nationwide problem, but we are learning how complex it is.

I will say that Alexandria Station remains a puzzle to be solved.

This is a

something that we have been meeting on site with Amtrak.

We had two days of observations just so they could see the confusion of the board saying something like train 95 now arriving and people are like, wait a minute, is that my train?

And then it says departing automatically.

And they're like, oh, maybe it is my train.

Maybe it was on this train, but they were supposed to get on a PRH.

or something like that.

But there's a lot of confusion every day, every afternoon for all these customers that really need to fix that.

Questions?

Jeremy, for Alexandria, stuff like this is like, oh,

At what point do station staff just get involved?

Are they getting involved?

What we're thinking about technological upgrades, good old-fashioned topographies from asking station staff to be like, hey, all right, I get that this is wrong.

So this is where we ended up with the three conditional devastation panel.

Good evening, Sam.

We went back out to Alexandria to watch.

One of the things we saw is, like, we had trains coming in.

The staff at the station had to go to open doors and meet the train and help people get on the train and have luggage so people with special needs.

So there was nobody to update it.

And as we're watching this, and then everybody was on it.

Everybody's working on our end of everything.

And we were there, so they were working.

They were on it.

And they usually are.

But then a lady came out of the station and said, I need to change my ticket.

There's nobody left over here.

Right.

So then you're constantly oversubscribed and you add every train, trains out of sync and customers confused and getting irritated, especially in a really hot those days.

Like it's just a very hard situation for the Amtrak staff.

So that's, you know, when we looked at that at Staples Mill and looked at the number of stations that need the accuracy, we tried with Alexandria from Union Station, but Union Station isn't itself its own universe.

So that didn't work.

And looking at it from Staples Mill, they taking on so many stations can't commit to something as complex as Alexandria either.

It's more dependent on the rails.

You can maintain it to a higher, much more extensive level.

I mean, when you get heat orders on the Northeast Quarter, for example, you're not slowing down at 25 miles an hour, but you're slowing down significantly.

It's just, it's based on track class.

The equipment doesn't really do that.

The infrastructure, I'm having a talk about this during the break.

It is going to allow for more flexibility for dispatching.

I mentioned the item platforms around Crystal City and adding the four track and we talked about the Alexandria area.

That's going to allow for more flexibility for dispatchers to have more capacity to get to more options.

And to bring a train into, I was asking why does Hertz-Alfond Train come in at the station

It's because the V retrain going north, you'd go up and take the train and come south and work.

The V retrain going north has to get over to Long Front.

It only had one option, which is the west platform.

Well, when the racing team put it in that island platform, it'll have two options.

So maybe Pappy Hill, if you don't mind, use an example.

But it is a great example of the flexibility it'll provide when we have the infrastructure we talked about earlier.

Better health assemblies problems, not gonna help with all of them, and the heat orders,

Thank you.

Kudos to whoever came up with this system for setting up standards.

The rail system's passenger rail for a long time

has not fully realized that they're competing with every other transportation system for the traveling dollar.

It was part of our agreements back in 2021 with Amtrak.

It's part of the larger CSX agreements.

Step in the right direction.

I agree.

Thank you.

Jeremy, I would just add, as you are presenting nationwide, we as a board, I think would love to hear about that and be updated.

So with that, we will move to our last item, which is

our FY26 organizational goals.

Thanks very much.

So at the end of every year, we take a look at how we did last year.

And then we, as an executive team, and really more importantly, as an organization, look at what will success look like a year from now, if we do everything we wanted.

And at least for the old adage, what this measure gets done.

And so these are goals that we look at every month, we talk about.

We want to make sure that as time passes, and the days are long but the years are short, as time passes that we are doing what we are here to do.

2030 is a big day getting Long Bridge done, but there are a lot of things that need to fall into place between now and then to continue our success.

So what we're going to talk about, and I'm going to kick it off and then we'll break it out to three other presentations.

But these are the goals that we as an organization have developed.

And it wasn't just the executive leadership team.

It was everybody at VPRA.

Hey, what does good look like?

We push back on each other.

I think we were really honest in saying, oh, come on, that's not a good date.

You can do it faster than that.

And we're also honest with, don't put a goal out there that there's no way we're going to hit.

We've got a good balance of stretch, but not impossible.

What we don't want to do is be here in November and say, well, there's no way we'll meet that route.

You've heard me say this before.

We put these goals into place.

What we're not going to do is make a bad business decision just to hit these goals.

And we saw one last year in FY24 where we had set a goal.

It did make sense after a few months to hit that, but we kept it and said, nope, we didn't hit that.

But we're proud of the fact that we made the right decision.

So we're going to go through what those goals look like.

We continue to break them into four categories.

This is what we've done for the last three years, because these are the main things that we feel we need to accomplish.

First is ridership and revenue.

If we don't grow ridership and revenue, and I say grow with an asterisk, we're really not fulfilling our mission.

Long Bridge is our key project.

It's really the backbone of everything we need to do to increase frequencies from eight down to seven, up to 13.

Additionally, we've got other major projects that we've got to get completed and they need to be completed by the time Long Bridge is done because if Long Bridge gets done at 2030 and we high five and say, let's add frequencies, but these other projects aren't done, that's a big fail.

And then the other category falls into organizational.

We quite frequently forget that we're only four and a half years old.

And as Steve said earlier, we got here, three of us, and I asked the board chair at that point, hey, can you show me all the policies and procedures we have so I can read up on them?

And she literally pointed to an empty bookcase and said, this is what you've got.

So the fact that we've gone from tracking pay time off in Excel and running our finances in QuickBooks.

to where we are now, we can't lose sight of the fact that it's only four and a half years and we've got a lot more work that we need to do.

So that other category historically has been, what are we doing to continue to mature and evolve the organization?

And so we'll talk about those four categories.

Those are the four categories we're going to talk about.

We'll go through each of the goals, all the ridership and revenue, and then I'll get the folks that actually have more ownership of those categories to brief them.

That said, we talk a lot about ownership,

Every goal we put in here, we're very careful that every person in the organization has a role.

So if you work for the legal department, yes, you don't have a clear goal here, but if you're not getting agreements done on time, we're not getting these projects done on time.

If you're doing it right away, everybody's got an impact here.

So it's important that we all as a group are rowing in the same direction through an article and focused on the same goal.

And again, we look at these every month.

Here's the sheet of our 26 organizational goals.

I'm not going to read them to you because we'll go through them section by section.

I'll kick it off with ridership and revenue.

Historically, we have had the ridership and revenue goals linked because

We don't want a situation where we can manipulate one to meet the other.

Ridership and revenue, we've talked about that sweet spot.

We want to be in a situation where we optimize that ridership and revenue.

If we really wanted to hit a ridership goal, we could make fares a dollar, and then ridership would be through the roof.

We'd probably get some riders that

We definitely wouldn't have had otherwise, but the revenue wouldn't be hit, and that wouldn't be what we're looking for.

Additionally, if we price things very high, riders should go way down, and folks that were desperate would hop on the train.

We would do well on revenue.

Historically, we have had those two linked.

This year, we are not going to do that.

We are going to do it again next year is our plan, but this year, because of the service changes we've talked about, we just don't think that it's a good idea.

We don't know what these service changes are going to be.

As I said earlier, we're going to go from 8 trains down to 7, so that's a 12.5% reduction.

We're hopeful that folks will ride other trains.

Those trains may be Virginia trains, which will continue our ridership.

They may be Virginia trains, which you don't see up there.

They may be Amtrak trains, which you don't see up there.

They may hop on these buses, which you don't see up there.

So this year and this year only, we are proposing to not have those two linked.

That said, we are going to watch it very closely.

And if one's not going to get hit, we're not going to sacrifice it to hit the other one.

And you all see these every month.

So we'll continue to talk about them as the year goes forward.

One thing I didn't say that I should have, and I just, somebody texted me on that and that's what it is.

Our goals go from October 1st to September 30th, with the exception of revenue and ridership, those follow the state fiscal year.

So that gives us, the state fiscal year ends in June.

That gives us a couple months to get the numbers from Amtrak and have the books finalized.

But other than that, our performance here is October to September.

So revenue and ridership.

We're setting a goal of 1.35 million riders and revenue of 82.7.

You're going to ask, how does that compare to this year?

Well, we're proposing to see a slight decrease in ridership and a slight decrease in revenue.

And as I said, we're going to see about a 12.5% reduction in train service going from 8 to 7.

We're going to work hard to capture and only have a 7% or so reduction in ridership and an 8% or so reduction in revenue.

So service goes down 12.5%.

We want to get most of that back through other Amtrak Virginia trains.

We've talked a lot about this.

There were folks that felt folks in the organization were losing 12.5% of service.

Let's bring these goals down 12.5%.

We didn't think that was reasonable because we're working, as Jeremy talked about, to put trains in place so people can still go where they want to go.

But these are what we settled on as an organization for goals for this coming fiscal year.

So again, 7% reduction in ridership, a little bit higher reduction in revenue because at this point with the construction period, we're more concerned about keeping the riders and the revenue could take a little bit more of a hit.

But that's our proposal going forward for ridership and revenue.

We'll continue to track it every month.

You'll see it in the ERs and we'll talk about it at the board meeting.

We're comfortable that if we hit these numbers a year from now, we'll be in a good shape as the construction season starts.

So any questions on that before I go to the next goal?

All right, next is Long Bridge.

We've talked about this.

Well, Ian's coming up.

Let me brag on him a little bit.

He's still looking in from CSX for over 10 years, correct?

Yeah.

We've talked about King Commonwealth really today.

There was a few years ago, there was three bridge strikes in a one month period of King Commonwealth.

We found a little bit into the records that one of the engineers called out to make sure the bridge was stable.

Was he in lane?

So he obviously has experience in a corridor and that just makes sure bridges are safe for building bridges, building infrastructure.

So we're very proud to have him on our team.

He works for Sherlene Cleveland.

So he's a VPRA employee.

You've seen Sherlene before.

We'd like to showcase, we'd like to let you know who's working on these projects.

So Ian is one of the main, we only have three people working on Long Bridge, you're one of them.

So he's got a great experience.

We're proud to have him.

And with that, I'm also smart enough to know that he knows more than me about building bridges.

So I'm going to turn the thumbs over to him.

And we're going to go over these three milestones.

This is a little bit fun.

The next slide will make it a little easier.

Great.

Thank you for that introduction, Mike.

So first off, we're going to talk about Long Bridge North and 80% of the critical path on Long Bridge North runs through Main Avenue, right?

There's a railroad bridge double track today over Main Avenue.

It will be a four track structure when it's all said and done.

Okay.

So in order to build that,

We need to get this temporary bridge across Main Avenue.

So by September 30th, next year, 2026, we're going to have that bridge in place as the goal.

Again, once we have the temporary structure in place, then we can go about removing the existing bridge.

And we'll talk a little bit more about that.

Second, complete Long Bridge North, early work packages one through three.

consists of crash wall work, of selective tree clearing, as well as demonstration foundations that we've done in order to conform with the final design.

We have some great pictures coming up in the next slides to show you some of that.

We're also gonna take a deep dive into the crash wall work as soon as it's ongoing today.

And all that will be completed by April 1st.

And then last but not least, we'll do Long Bridge South and issue the notice

to proceed for construction to Long Bridge Rail Partners no later than September 13th of next year.

Okay, jumping back to that first goal, and that's the temporary bridge across Main Avenue.

So on the left hand picture here, you see the foundation construction in the existing bridge, kind of in the background there with Amtrak and CSX training upon it.

So we'll get the foundations in place, and then on the right hand side,

The delivery of the new superstructure, which is the temporary spans across Main Avenue.

This is important, again, at 80% of the critical path for the project runs through Main Avenue.

Once we get the temporary span up, then we can go about demolishing my old bridge.

How we're going to do that is we're actually going to settle the bridge in half.

That's a common through-plate burger.

We're going to remove that middle section in order to make way for the permanent bridge.

All right, getting on to the early works pack.

Any questions on that one?

I just think it's really the cutting a piece in half.

But we'd be perfectly safe.

So, jumping to the early works packages, last year one of our goals was to advance design on nine of them.

Three of them were advanced horse construction.

So these three, crash wall work underneath Maryland Avenue, overbuild

when we're increasing the thickness as well as the width of the grass walls in order to make them more robust.

And then we also have selective tree clearing and that's all done outside of the time of year restriction, right?

There's a period of time during the year where we're not going to take down trees due to birds bats, right?

So we can take them down any time outside of those restrictions.

All of that would be to maintain project schedule.

And then last, the third package is our demonstration foundations.

We have drilled shafts by propiles that are built and then tested.

The testing data will then be used in form-final design, right?

To tell us whether or not we need to go any deeper, whether we can pull our foundations a little more shallow, those sorts of things.

From here,

We'll jump into some crash wall work.

This work is ongoing.

This is EWP1, or Early Work Package, excuse me.

This work is taking place north of Washington Channel and Main Avenue in the red box there that you see on the bottom left-hand corner.

Today, there are two tracks that run underneath the Maryland Avenue Overbuild underneath the center of Bay.

On the next slide, we'll take a look at

New configuration.

But essentially, as tracks get closer to a bridge structure, they move closer to a pier, we need to make the crash walls more robust.

There are flash walls there today protecting those piers, but we're going to make them higher and we're going to make them thicker.

We're bringing them up to the current standards as we approach those.

Kind of a fine point here.

The purpose of the crash walls is to limit damage to the overhead structure, right?

We're not going to prevent an outright collision, but should a shifted load or a derailment take place in this area, we are better protecting those piers.

Right, so this proposed the new configuration

Underneath the overbuild, this is a very similar view.

Looking north, we have crash walls C, D, and E. These are all protecting the Maryland Avenue overbuild, which is a privately owned structure.

And then we've got crash wall F and G on the far side, on the right, rather, which are protecting DDOT structures, 12th Street Southwest and the 12th Street Expressway.

Currently, we're working on crash wall D and F, and we'll get this

Those photos here, but that's the center pier between what will be track five and track four.

Right, so now again, ongoing early works package construction.

We've got a picture of Crash Wall D and Crash Wall F. D protects the overbuild.

Crash Wall F protects D-nots 12th Street and

What they're doing here is they're installing reinforcement steel that will then be formed up and then they'll place concrete around them in order to extend to the height of this crash wall from about seven feet to greater than 12 feet.

Okay, similarly on the crash wall F, reinforcing steel from an elevated platform.

On the left, crash wall D, this is a pump truck in the foreground on the left.

And then you can see the formwork as well as the formwork reinforcement.

They're getting prepared for a concrete placement.

Concrete truck pulls up to the duty truck and then it can disperse concrete up into the form system.

Again, that's crash wall D on the far side.

In the background, you can see crash wall F. They are building the scaffold system in order to build the formwork.

Install the rebar, and then in the foreground you see Crash Wall D, and that's actually a nearly completed bay.

The concrete has been hoarded, you can kind of see the different color of concrete on top.

Five added to that bay.

Not quite in its final form, but getting pretty close.

On the left-hand side, Crash Wall D. This is freshly placed.

Concrete inside the form, kind of looking down, it's kind of a different perspective, but you're on an elevated platform looking down at the new crash wall.

And then Crash Wall D on the right hand side, there's a 3D base with the added height.

Moving to Crash Wall F, a little closer look at installing the elevated scaffolding system for workers to get on top of and

Install the form and reinforcement steel.

And then we have a gentleman on the right hand side who's actually sounding concrete.

He's looking for any deformations, these falls, anything that we need to repair on the existing.

Got word that we'd extend the crash wall up, but we're also, while we're there, going to make sure that the existing crash walls are in good shape.

So that's that's our indication.

I guess why are you destroying me like taking down part and building a temporary piece, right?