Continuing the Biden-Harris Administration’s focus on implementing its economic agenda to deliver real results for the American people, President Biden is traveling to Baltimore, Maryland, to kick off a major project funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to replace the 150-year old Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel. This project will address the largest rail bottleneck on the Northeast Corridor between Washington, D.C. and New Jersey, and create good-paying union jobs, improve reliability, lower commuting times, and enhance safety and resilience. The program is expected to generate 30,000 jobs, including approximately 20,000 direct construction jobs, most of which do not require a college degree.
President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law makes the largest investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak, with a $66 billion investment in rail.
At the project kickoff event, the President will announce:
- A project kickoff agreement has been signed by the State of Maryland and Amtrak, which includes a $450 million commitment from the state’s transportation agency for the tunnel replacement project;
- A project labor agreement has been signed between Amtrak and the Baltimore-DC Building and Construction Trades Council, which is a local affiliate of North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU), to cover the first phase of the project to ensure the project creates good-paying, union jobs; and,
- An agreement is in place between Amtrak and North American Builders’ Trade Union (NABTU) that ensures Amtrak’s large civil engineering construction projects controlled by Amtrak will be performed under union agreements. Those agreements will address points such as wages, benefits, working conditions, avoiding work disruption, and promoting diversity and veteran hiring in the construction trades. With this agreement, Amtrak and NABTU will not face labor-related delays in the planning and contracting of major projects; contractors and subcontractors share Amtrak’s commitment to paying fair wages and benefits; and, Amtrak and NABTU can move forward with Bipartisan Infrastructure Law-funded projects with efficient labor-management relations.
Frederick Douglass Tunnel
The 150 year-old Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel is the oldest tunnel on the Northeast Corridor. The 1.4-mile tunnel beneath densely populated West Baltimore connects Baltimore’s Penn Station to points south. The tunnel is the largest Northeast Corridor bottleneck between Washington and New Jersey and a single point of failure for the nine million Amtrak and Maryland Area Commuter (MARC) passengers who rely on it annually. In other words, there are no detours possible if the aging tunnel were to unexpectedly close. The tunnel’s tight curvature and steep incline requires trains to reduce speeds to 30 mph. These issues create chronic delays — more than 10% of weekday trains are delayed, and delays occur on 99% of weekdays.
The Baltimore-Potomac Tunnel Replacement Program will build a new tunnel with two tubes along an alignment with softer curves; ventilation and emergency egress facilities; new signaling systems, overhead catenary, and track; five new roadway and railroad bridges in the area surrounding the tunnel; and a new ADA-accessible West Baltimore MARC station. The new tunnel will be named in honor of the civil rights leader and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, a Maryland native and frequent railroad passenger after escaping to his freedom from slavery by boarding a train in Baltimore.
When the program is complete, speed and capacity improvements will help enable service growth and eliminate nearly seven hours of train delay for the average weekday. Capacity of the tunnel is expected to nearly triple, and trains travelling through the tunnel will be able to go a up to 110 miles per hour versus the current 30 miles per hour. By one estimate, replacing the tunnel would save nearly 450,000 hours per year for MARC and Amtrak customers.
The total cost of the program is expected to be approximately $6 billion, of which Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding could contribute up to $4.7 billion. While the project received $44 million through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act for preliminary engineering and permitting, it lacked a viable funding source for construction until the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law