Long Bridge DC CAG Meeting #7   10/29/2026

Okay.

Good afternoon and welcome to the seventh community advisory group meeting for VPRA's Long Bridge project with a focus on DC.

This CAG is designed to maintain ongoing coordination and communication with leaders in Southwest DC.

We meet on a quarterly basis, and we greatly appreciate your participation and your feedback throughout these meetings.

Next slide, please.

Let's start by introducing our team that's presenting today.

Absolutely.

Good afternoon.

My name is Naomi Klein.

I work for the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority on the Long Bridge project.

I oversee environmental permitting and stakeholder management.

I've been with VPRA for about four years now.

Thanks, Meredith.

Thanks.

And I'm Meredith Judy.

I'm the Community Affairs Manager with VPRA for Northern Virginia and DC projects.

Maybe Frank isn't on yet.

Sure.

Sure.

Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Scott Crumley.

I'm the design manager for the Long Bridge Project.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, everybody.

My name is Brian Breese.

Terrific.

Thank you.

Our agenda today includes a very brief refresher on the Long Bridge project,

And then we'll spend the majority of our time providing construction updates for progress in Washington, DC on the Potomac River and in Arlington, Virginia.

We hope that you'll take a brief survey at the end of today's presentation.

We're looking to collect some feedback on how we can improve these meetings going forward, both the content and the frequency and timing of them.

Yeah, thank you so much, Meredith.

And hopefully given that this is our meeting number seven, you are familiar with the Long Bridge Project.

But if this is your first time joining us, welcome.

I'm going to give you a very brief overview.

There is currently a two-track railroad bridge that crosses the Potomac River.

If you've ever ridden the Yellow Line Metro via your Amtrak, you would have either gone across the bridge, or if you were on the Yellow Line, you would have seen that bridge.

That bridge is essentially at 98% capacity.

It's shared by Virginia Railway Express, CSX Freight, and Amtrak Inner City Passenger Rail.

So what our project's going to do is build a new two-track bridge adjacent to the existing bridge.

And while it's called the Long Bridge Project, it actually consists of five different rail bridges and two biker pedestrian bridges between the Long Bridge Aquatic Center in Arlington and just south of L'Enfant Plaza in DC.

There are two other adjacent projects.

There's an Alexandria fourth track project south of this project.

And then there's also the Longthon station and fourth track project north of this project.

The idea being that we will have a four track continuous corridor from Union Station all the way south to Alexandria that will allow us to separate freight rail from passenger rails that we can run more passenger rail trains.

So imagine VRE trains being able to run at nights or on weekends and train service between DC and Richmond every hour.

Those are the kinds of goals that we have in mind at VPRA.

Now we're not a rail operator.

We don't run the trains.

We just partner with the operators.

And our job at VPRA is to implement these projects and then we own the rail and the rail right of way.

In addition to the rail bridges, the five rail bridges, we're also building a new bicycle pedestrian bridge across the Potomac River.

That's going to be 16 feet wide, dedicated only to bikes and pedestrians.

And it will connect the Mount Vernon Trail on the Virginia side with the Long Bridge Aquatic Center.

And then on the DC side, on the other side of the Potomac River, to East Ohio Drive in East Potomac Park.

So you can go to the next slide, Meredith.

So due to the size of this project, for the purposes of construction, it's been split into two construction packages.

So on the left in purple is the south package, and that's going to be responsible for all the work in Virginia and Arlington, and then the rail bridge over the Potomac River and the bicycle pedestrian bridge over the Potomac River.

The south package is design build.

We're at

90% design with design expected to be finished next spring, spring of 2027.

And then construction has begun over the past year.

You can see we're at 15% of construction completed.

We're about to, in the next week or so, begin our first permanent construction works in the water.

We're going to be driving piles for the rail bridge.

That's a very exciting milestone for the project.

And construction is expected to continue

through 2030.

So the south package will be doing the rail bridge over the Potomac River and then the bicycle pedestrian bridge.

And then at East Potomac Park where it hits the river, that's where the south package then transitions to the north package, which you see in yellow.

The north package is responsible for four rail bridges and one pedestrian bridge.

The rail bridges are crossing I-395, crossing Ohio Drive,

Crossing the Washington Channel, and then Crossing Main Avenue.

And then at Main Avenue, there will also be a replacement pedestrian bridge that will be constructed by the North Package.

They, like the South Package, are at 90% design expected to complete design next spring.

And then they have been doing some what we call early works construction, and they have begun to build some of their permanent elements for the Main Avenue Rail Bridge.

And now I believe I'm turning it over to Frank.

Hi, good afternoon, everyone.

Frank Wagliata from Skanska Flatiron and Joint Venture working on Long Bridge North.

Walk you through some of the construction updates on the north side of this project in the DC area.

So

On the north end on Main Avenue, this is a picture of our site looking south towards the Potomac.

On the north side of Main Ave, there's been a lot of work that we've completed with relationship to the piers and the abutment.

that will be part of the future bridge.

If you look in the picture there, what you see that little gray block, that's our pier two.

And then what's just beneath that in the picture is our abutment on the north side.

So a lot of foundation work has taken place.

We've completed all the micropile in that area.

and we've completed the drilled shafts that are part of a retaining wall that's between the tracks and the 1331 Maryland Avenue building.

In terms of what's coming up, this will be primarily focused on the south side, so further away from the vantage point there on the picture.

We have a

An existing retaining wall that we've demolished that will make room for the new abutment for our main avenue bridge.

There will be ongoing work on that retaining wall that I was just mentioning that will start to take shape.

Actually, some of it's taking shape right now.

We're installing posts as we speak that will continue through November and roughly by late

November, early December, we'll start to see some panels go up.

So that wall will literally start taking shape later on this year.

We are anticipating to perform a traffic shift on Main Avenue around the 18th of December is what we're tracking right now.

And that will open up a lot of that Southern workspace for us.

Also coming down the line are the installation of overhead

structures.

So the first one to go up will be our span, what we call our span three.

So that's the span that's going to go over that pier that I just mentioned and the abutment that I talked about in the picture.

That will be early December.

And then we're looking to get the span for the future temporary pedestrian bridge, which is to the left of this picture, also by the end of this year.

It won't be open though to the public that it's like step one is putting the span over the road.

There's other work that needs to happen that's going to take us well into the spring, including ramp connections, lighting, things of that nature.

We'll be in the spring by the time we're ready to open it to the public, the new temporary pedestrian bridge.

Next slide, please.

So this is just a drone video that

That was taken not too long ago with the project.

The work that you see there, that's actually one of the posts for the walls that I was just referring to.

What you'll see at the bottom of this video is our abutment B for Main Avenue.

All right, let me jump in here.

As Frank mentioned, lots of work going on in the Main Avenue corridor here.

If you've been a part of these meetings before, you probably remember this graphic.

It really does a great job of depicting the two primary construction phases along Main Avenue right near the Potomac Hotel.

The westbound construction phase is shown in that upper left graphic where most of the work is going along the north side of Main Avenue, again, between the hotel and the residences.

And then the eastbound construction phase is where the majority of work is on the other side of Main Avenue near the Washington marina.

And the colors, the dark green and the teal correspond to the schedule below.

And so as you can see, the dark green, the westbound construction phase, we've been in that construction phase for about 15 months now.

And at the end of 2026 here is when we expect to transition to that eastbound construction phase in the winter.

So like Frank said, right around December 18th.

And then we'll go back to the westbound construction phase

in winter of 28, and then back to the eastbound construction phase in spring of 29.

Of course, timeframe is subject to change, but at least this gives you a general sense of how the construction phasing is working in this area here.

On the next slide, this really hones in on that eastbound construction phase that we are intending to implement as early as mid-December.

So less than two months away, this is the planned travel patterns along Main Avenue.

We're still going to be maintaining two lanes along westbound Main Avenue.

Those are shown in green here.

They will be realigned from where they currently are.

And then the eastbound travel approach will be reduced to one lane, which is shown in the teal color here.

Pedestrians will be maintained along the pink routes here that you see today.

So pedestrian access will still be maintained along Main Avenue.

The next slide highlights the planned long-term detour for large trucks and buses.

Basically, trucks and buses

If they're down in the NAMA or East Potomac Park area there, if you see the green arrow there coming up Ohio Drive towards that red circle, standard vehicles will still be able to turn right at that intersection onto eastbound Main Avenue.

But for oversized vehicles, especially trucks, tour buses, that sort of thing,

They will be directed to follow a detour, again, which is shown here in green, to use Raul Wallenberg up to Jefferson Drive, back down towards Independence, back to Raul Wallenberg in order to access eastbound Main Avenue.

So we wanted to alert everyone to that.

That's, again, standard vehicles will still be able to make that right turn, no problem.

But it's the larger vehicles that will be required to follow this detour.

And I think we've got one more slide focused on the pedestrian and bike accessibility during the eastbound construction phase here.

We've showed these graphics many times before, and they're unchanged.

Again, the pink routes show the pedestrian access around the work zone.

And I just wanted to highlight that during the Cherry Blossom Festival next year and around the 4th of July holiday, pedestrian access will be widened along eastbound Main Avenue for pedestrians and bikes for additional capacity.

So we'll talk a little bit about the progress at our East Potomac Park location.

So some of the things that we've completed include the trestle, which we're going to share a video with you all here shortly about that.

We also worked during this planned outage that took place a few days ago.

I heard the news of the track outage that was spearheaded by Amtrak for some of the work that they were doing further north of us.

So that gave us the ability to install over 120 piles that we will be using for subsequent work later on down the line.

So that was a great coordination effort that took place to get all that accomplished.

And in terms of what we're looking at,

In this section of our project, we have foundation and bridge work that will start taking shape through all of next year, including retaining walls and some utility relocations that will take place to advance some of the construction.

So we'll share this Trussell video with you and

The trestle is basically, this is looking south towards the Potomac.

The trestle, we started on this earlier this year and it's to set up a platform over the Washington Channel that will enable us to complete the new rail bridge that we are constructing in this area.

What you'll see through the graphics is first set of activities are turbidity curtains that go into the water.

That's that orange red flotation device that you see around the work.

used to maintain a clean workspace.

And the process for installing the Trestle is very repetitive.

So what you'll see is a template that's placed first to guide the piles that go in afterwards.

And the piles are those green pipes that you see going in right now.

Once the piles are driven in, then we set beams and cross frames.

and above that then we set a portion of our deck and our railing and that process repeats itself over and over until we complete the landing on the other side.

And then at the end of this video you'll see a small platform that's being built towards the bridge and that will facilitate crane movement later on for as we access the piers that are going to be built in the water there.

So now the trestle is

at this point completely spanned over Washington Channel and that allows our crews to have access to this bridge from both the north and the south, which is very important to us.

And that's the additional platform I was just mentioning, the one that's going to go towards the bridge.

And this is another aerial shot of our work.

So our retaining walls are supported by these pipe pile foundations.

And this is a shot obviously looking towards Jefferson Memorial.

And that row that you see there of pipe piles will eventually be a retaining wall that will tie into the new bridge over Ohio Drive, which is roughly where that train's crossing right now.

So yeah, very, very exciting work that's starting to take shape.

It's starting to actually look like a real project out here.

Lastly, for us on the south side near 395, we are active in this area as well.

So in this area, we've completed a series of traffic shifts along 395 that opens up our work

Zone for what we call Pier 3 which is the pier that's going to be in the middle of the interstate there and we will progress the work for the abutments which are on the outside of the roadway.

So coming up we have ground improvements and we are preparing obviously all these piers and abutments for

Thanks, Meredith.

Again, Brian Breeze from Long Bridge Rail Partners, working on the Long Bridge South Project.

So just to quickly review our scope a little bit, if you want to back up one slide, Meredith, as Naomi talked about in the beginning, most of our work is either over the river or on the Arlington County side of things, we do have

A little bit of structures work on East Potomac Park there along Ohio Drive Southwest where both the Ped Bridge and the rail bridge come back to land at the abutments after crossing the river.

Go ahead.

Next slide, please.

What you're looking at here is Abutment B.

This is where the rail bridge lands in East Potomac Park.

immediately across the street, Ohio Drive from the river.

What you're looking at is all the H-pile, the deep foundations to hold up the abutment.

They were driven here over the last couple of months.

We have also formed, rebarred and poured the pile cap there, the footing for the abutment.

And we're moving on here over the next couple of months to finish that abutment.

So we have the stem wall

to pour as well as the wing walls to pour.

And once that's done for the rail bridge, pretty much all the substructure work for the rail bridge on East Potomac Park on the DC side is complete.

The rest of the work is either on Arlington County side or over the river.

Next slide, please.

So what you're looking at here, a couple of things that we've been busy on the water putting our mooring piles in.

So if you're out there on a boat, you're going to see a series of piles sticking out of the water in several locations.

And those were installed so that we can safely fleet up our equipment when not in use or during storm events and things along those lines.

You've also

Probably seen us shift the navigational channels.

So in working with the Coast Guard, we have the ability to move the navigational channel through different spans of the bridges, the existing bridges, so that we can complete the work necessary to build a bridge.

So most recently, we've been removing a portion of the fender ring that goes underneath the yellow line bridge.

So we've had to shift the navigational channel a couple spans away to allow us to do that work.

What you're seeing in the lower right-hand corner there in that picture, that's a barge full of pipe pile, the permanent pipe pile that will hold up the rail bridge ultimately.

There's about five million pounds of pile on there that was shipped up from Texas.

I think the big thing here that I want to point out is that we delivered this to a yard, an off-site yard about 50 miles downstream, and that kept all that

that traffic off of the road.

So that's a big part of our approach to this project is trying to minimize the excessive loads and the large materials coming in on the local roadway network.

Obviously, MOT and congestion is a major concern.

So rather than putting them on the road on trucks to deliver them to the site, we're going to bring them up

the river on barges.

Over the next couple of weeks, we will get going on permanent pile installation out there on the river.

We'll be starting from both the DC shoreline and the Virginia shoreline, working our way towards the middle of the river over the next six months.

Next slide, please.

We're continuing to work on our access.

Over the past several months, we've been building bulkheads along both the Virginia shoreline and the DC shoreline.

That allows us personnel access and the ability to walk our cranes on and off the water, get equipment on and off the water, materials on and off the water.

We do have one additional access point that we have to build and that will be

Moving over to the Arlington, Virginia side of things.

Again, most of our activities over there have been access related.

We've been building out our construction yards in the loop ramps by the Aquatic Center boundary channel.

You'll see our office trailers over there.

We'll have different staging areas over there, parking areas as well as material staging.

We've also been busy over there installing the foundations for the south abutment for the rail bridge, Abutment A, and that's immediately adjacent to the aquatic center over there.

So we've been over there doing deep foundation work.

You've seen a crane adjacent to the aquatic center in between the aquatic center and the tracks.

That work will be continuing on land over there.

The Abutment A work is done.

but the deep foundation installation will continue on piers one, two, three, and four, working our way towards the river from the aquatic center on the river side of the GWMP.

To complete this work, we will have intermittent traffic impacts, so we'll be closing lanes periodically.

We'll also have a lane shift that allows us to build the pier in the median of George Washington Memorial Parkway.

Next slide, please.

I think the highlight here for this slide is that we have detoured the Mount Vernon Trail to separate the trail from our construction activities.

A big concern that we always had about this is that the trail went right through our staging areas and construction crews and construction equipment was constantly

going to interact with that trail traffic.

So we successfully switched over to the detour, which got the trail traffic away from construction activities.

Thanks, Brian.

Just to add on to that, we had some excellent collaborative outreach, as you mentioned, particularly as related to this Mount Vernon Trail outreach work.

Both the Washington Area Bicycle Association and the Friends of Mount Vernon Trail joined us in our outreach when we did this implementation of the detour.

And the Friends of Mount Vernon Trail posted a video of the new trail configuration.

We have it linked here, but it reached more than 300,000 viewers

across multiple platforms.

So we're just very grateful for the partnerships that we have as we're moving through this construction process.

Next slide.

That moves us into our public outreach portion of our presentation today.

Public outreach on the Long Bridge project has continued through the summer and into this fall.

Some of the highlights we've noted here on the slide, they include participation in the 9-11 Memorial Trail Walk and Bike event, which included tabling and a presentation of the Long Bridge Project at the Long Bridge Aquatic Center for the participants of that walk.

Also, we've had some focused outreach efforts in the boating community.

We

I already regularly send a monthly digital update to the Meritor community, but our team went out this month and visited many of the marinas to make sure that those digital advisories are useful to them and that they're being posted on their sign boards at the marinas.

And for boat launches that don't have staffing or buildings, we established and put some signage in the ground so that all types of

boat users know the activities that are ongoing and how to be in touch with us if they have any questions.

We continue to work closely with the ANC 60 commissioners, including a recent site walk on Main Avenue with several of the commissioners so that we can answer specific questions about traffic impacts and communication strategies.

And we meet often with wharf leadership and Southwest bid.

We attend a variety of neighborhood events hosted in and around the Southwest neighborhoods.

We table, we distribute information, we have display boards, just trying to reach as diverse an audience as possible of those who are impacted and who are our neighbors during construction.

Next slide, please.

This is a summary of our digital outreach successes over the last quarter.

We'll start implementing this in our slide deck each quarter so you can see how we're reaching out in a digital way and the kind of impact that we're having.

We now have 3,400 subscribers for our eBLAS and our newsletters.

Our social media over the last quarter reached over 64,000 views, and our fall newsletter had over 1,500 unique readers.

And our videos have had 4.2 thousand views as well.

Next slide.

Just noting some of our ongoing public outreach activities and making sure that everyone on this call is plugged in.

We have our weekly traffic advisories that we issue jointly with DDOT and NPS.

We have our two week stakeholder look ahead summary for residents and business owners in the Southwest area.

And we have two regular e-blasts that go out to the over 3000

subscribers that I mentioned on the last slide.

That includes a monthly construction update, which is streamlined and highlights the most recent and most visible construction progress and impacts.

And then we have a quarterly newsletter that is highly visual.

Lots of photos, stories of project milestones and spotlights on our key partners and area businesses.

Next slide, please.

As we've noted in previous CAGs, we recognize that businesses in the vicinity of our Main Avenue construction are concerned about customers, delivery access, and one of the many ways that we're trying to be good neighbors during construction is to notify travelers that businesses are open.

The signage that you see here on the slide will soon be installed on the fencing along Main Avenue.

We're also, in addition, working with Southwest BID to generate some more pedestrian-oriented detour and destination signage.

This is a little bit of our information on our hotlines, both our phone hotline and our email hotline.

Our email hotline is also a way to sign up for our email notices.

So we hope that everyone here is subscribed and receiving our information.

Next slide.

This is a very brief survey and we hope that you will take a few minutes to fill it out.

You can scan the QR code or you can just use the link here.

But we want to make sure that as we continue to meet with you that we are providing the information that you need and that you want.

and that your community wants and that we're getting the feedback that can help us be the most supportive of our community while we're doing this construction.

So please take a moment to fill out that survey and send that back to us.

And we'll also be sending that out by email to anyone who's not on the call today.

All right, next slide.

I'd like to open it up to

Anyone in the group have something they want to ask us while we have our team on the call?

You can either put your hand up or you can just go ahead and start speaking.

We don't have a huge group today.

No questions?

Checking the chat here, okay.

All right then, I can let you all go.

Please know that we have our next meeting in about three months, so that will be in January.

We'll be sending out notification beforehand so that you have the date and the time, and we appreciate you being here today.

I think that's the last slide.

Is there anything else, Sarah?

Okay.

I'll let you all go.

Thanks, Meredith.

Thanks, everyone.