Lorton Auto Train

Here follows an excerpt from Nathaniel Lee's book, "The Iron Road of Franconia" about the railroad:

To counter the downward trend in passenger rail service, the United States Congress passed the Rail Service Passenger Act of 1970. This legislation established the National Railroad Passenger Corporation. The mission Congress gave them was to take over the passenger routes operated by private railroad companies. Congress gave the railroad companies an ultimatum: To either continue operating current passenger rail routes in perpetuity or turn over routes to the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, who would then operate the route.

The RF&P Railroad signed on, as did other passenger railroads around the country. The National Railroad Passenger Corporation replaced all of the RF&P passenger trains with its novel new service called Amtrak. Amtrak began service on May 1, 1971 serving 43 states with a total of 21 routes. The routes at the beginning were just routes the local trains were already running. Amtrak often used the same train cars purchased straight from the railroads they took over, still painted with the old color schemes of their previous owners. Amtrak also had priority on the same tracks run by the freight railroads, but with overcrowded routes, trains ended up delayed for everyone, passenger or freight. In the end, many freight companies found it easier to send their trains along other routes to avoid the Alexandria area, which hurt the RF&P Railroad.

Unfortunately, Amtrak initially chose to bypass Fairfax County for stops in more populated areas. The RF&P Railroad then shuttered its local passenger stations along the line, including Newington and Lorton Stations. It is interesting to note that service to both stations fell short of the century mark by just a single year, having been in existence for ninety-nine years. Decades later, Amtrak did temporarily place a stop on its Northeast Regional Service at the Franconia-Springfield station between 1997 and 2010, to mixed results. Amtrak receives taxpayer funding in exchange for providing passenger rail service, but has never turned a profit due to competition from planes and cars.

Also in 1971, a wildly successful passenger route started called the Auto Train. The Auto Train runs for 850 miles between Lorton Station and the town of Sanford, Florida, just minutes outside of Orlando. Often billed as the longest passenger train in the world, it is a daily train service run for passengers and their vehicles. The passengers can ride in coaches or sleeper cars while their vehicles (be it car, van or motorcycle) ride on specially designed auto racks. Connected together, the train can include fifty railcars and stretch for over 4,000 feet, nearly a mile in length. It is the only one of its kind operated in the United States. It allows passengers to avoid the traffic on Interstate 95 or the crowded airport terminals, while still bringing their own car with them. Passengers leave the station at 4:00 p.m. one day and arrive the next morning at 9:00 a.m. at their destination. Service temporarily halted in the year 1981 when the Auto Train Corporation ran into financial hardship and declared bankruptcy. That was due to bad routes created in western states, not the Lorton to Sanford route. Amtrak then took over the service in 1983. The Auto Train often wins awards for its high quality equipment and great customer service. It also pulls in about fifty million dollars in revenues every year, making it Amtrak’s best performing train.

A day on the Auto Train is a busy one for the railroad workers. Station gates open at 11:30 a.m. for passengers to drive their car to a staging area. There, a magnet with a unique car number is placed on the driver’s door and the car is scanned for preexisting damages, in case someone files a claim later. The passengers leave their car and go to the station to await boarding. Workers arrange the vehicles by size into an optimal loading order and then put them on the auto racks. The workers then connect all the passenger cars and auto racks together into one long train, and passengers come aboard an hour before it departs at 4:00 p.m. At midnight, train crews quickly stop in Florence, South Carolina to refuel the engines and change crews. The train finally arrives at its destination at 9:00 a.m. where workers separate the train cars and the vehicles are unloaded from the auto racks, a process that can take two hours with a full train.