Imagine being able to travel all the way from New England, New York, or Philadelphia all the way to Baltimore, Washington, DC, or even Alexandria without ever once setting foot on an Amtrak train or a bus. Imagine being able to make your daily commute from Delaware or Cecil County to Baltimore by train.

Imagine being able to take the MARC Penn Line straight into Downtown Baltimore or being able to switch MARC trains much faster if the one you’re on breaks down. All these options might become a reality under studies the Maryland legislature has prescribed.

House Bill 1236, the MARC Train Expansion of Service Act, which passed the Maryland General Assembly last month, had already called for the Maryland Transit Administration to study the possibility of expanding service on the MARC Penn Line, one of two commuter lines connecting Baltimore and DC, into Virginia.

But it’s the bill’s last-minute amendments calling for the MTA to look at extending Penn Line service from Perryville in Cecil County to link up with Philadelphia’s SEPTA commuter rail at Newark and connecting the Penn and Camden Lines in downtown Baltimore that really hold the potential to create the regional rail network riders have been dreaming about for decades.

Originally, Delegate Jared Solomon (D-Montgomery), who introduced the bill, had only planned to focus his legislation on trying to move towards “thru-running” MARC trains into Virginia. “But the more we discussed it, we knew that there was obviously bipartisan, broad support across the state for expanding access to MARC. And so as we moved the bill through the House (of Delegates), it became more and more obvious that we should expand the bill to cover some other areas,” he said.

“We realized it was important to make this a statewide bill,” said Del. Brooke Lierman (D-Baltimore City), who as the bill’s “floor manager,” was responsible for adding the bill’s amendments and helping shepherd it through the House and into the State Senate, “and to address multiple unmet MARC train needs.”

A map showing the current MARC Penn and Camden lines, along with the SEPTA Wilmington/Newark Line, and possible new service from Perryville to Newark. Map by David Ramos. (Data from OpenStreetMap and USGS.)

Filling the gap

One of the most obvious needs was covering the only significant 20-mile gap in commuter rail service on the Northeast Corridor: the stretch between Perryville, the northern terminus of the MARC Penn Line, and Newark, the southern terminus of the SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority) Wilmington/Newark Line.

Cecil County is the only Maryland county included by the US Census Bureau in the Philadelphia metropolitan area and Perryville is actually slightly closer to Wilmingtonthan Baltimore so adding a commuter rail link to the county’s northern neighbors has long been a priority for the region.

“Cecil County pays to run a bus along that route and Cecil County shouldn’t have to do that,” said Lierman. “This is good for people in Delaware but it’s also good for people using the MARC train who want to be able to have access to additional jobs north of Maryland.”

Lierman’s assessment was echoed by Del. Kevin Hornberger (R-Cecil), whose district includes Perryville.

“Locally, this is a huge deal,” said Hornberger. “If you go to the Perryville station, you’ll see numerous folks with New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware tags and you’ll see a lot of Maryland folks too that live here in Cecil County. Regionally, it’s a big deal because this is the last commuter gap on the East Coast. Cecil’s been making a lot of efforts over the last 15 years to close this gap so we were very glad to see that they were able to include us on the bill.”

As amended, Solomon’s bill would require MDOT (the Maryland Department of Transportation) to enter into “good faith negotiations” with Delaware and SEPTA to establish a pilot program running two morning trains from Perryville to Newark and two evening trains from Newark to Perryville, identify any obstacles like adding a track switch or extra track, attempt to come up with solutions for those problems, and report back to the Maryland General Assembly by December 2021.

One thing that could help move forward the study, according to Joe McAndrew, the Director of Transportation Policy for the Greater Washington Partnership, is that Amtrak has 28 new Acela trains tentatively scheduled to enter service next year, which he thinks could possibly free up some of Amtrak’s existing fleet for MARC service to Delaware.

How MARC expansion benefits Baltimore

But it’s not just Cecil County who now stands to gain from what started out as just a bill expanding MARC service into Virginia. Baltimore City could also benefit as well. That’s because Lierman also added an amendment to Solomon’s bill which calls for MDOT to study building a rail connection between the two MARC lines which run through Baltimore, the Penn and Camden Lines.

That could include “enabl(ing) Penn Line service into downtown Baltimore”, which in and of itself would make it infinitely easier for visitors traveling in by rail from out of town to reach destinations like the Inner Harbor, the Baltimore Convention Center, Camden Yards, and M&T Bank Stadium. It could even eliminate at least some of the need for the MTA’s Penn-Camden Shuttle, which uses the same trains and track space as its LightRailLink network, freeing the MTA up to run trains on that network more frequently.

But even if the study doesn’t wind up calling for that, creating a Penn-Camden link could still benefit Baltimore riders and even riders well outside Charm City. “Right now, there’s no place to move trains from the Penn Line to the Camden Line any place except in Washington, DC”, Lierman said. “And that’s a huge problem. If a train breaks down on the Penn Line and the Camden Line has an extra train, being able to move that line from the Camden Line to the Penn Line, we can’t do that right now.”

That’s why the bill specifically calls for a Penn-Camden connection to include “access to Riverside Yard”, a rail facility in South Baltimore’s Locust Point neighborhood which MDOT purchased from CSX Rail in 2018, “for locomotive repair and maintenance.” Right now, according to MDOT spokesperson Brittany Marshall, “the Riverside Yard is MTA’s only diesel locomotive maintenance facility and all of MARC’s diesel locomotives are maintained there.”

Lierman also tried to add a provision calling for the MTA to revive plans to construct a new MARC station at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Southeast Baltimore, an idea which had originally been planned in conjunction with the city’s Red Line but was abandoned after that line’s cancellation. That particular amendment was scrapped and tabled for next year, partly because of cost concerns, and partly to ensure the bill’s passage during the final hour before the ongoing coronavirus crisis forced Maryland’s General Assembly to adjourn early for the first time since the Civil War.

The intersection of MARC and the coronavirus

And even though extending MARC service further within Cecil County or Baltimore City may seem beside the point at a time when COVID-19 and its already devastating economic impacts have caused the MTA to scale back the frequency of its bus and rail service, Lierman believes the crisis also highlights why supporting public transit, including commuter rail, is so crucial for Marylanders. “I think the COVID-19 public health crisis has demonstrated the importance of transit and transportation availability for essential employees,” said Lierman. “It’s really important for people to understand that when everything else fails, our transit system has to keep going.”

Likewise, Solomon believes that public transit has the potential to play an important role in Maryland’s coronavirus economic recovery, including expanding MARC. “We made a tremendous amount of progress with this bill,” Solomon said. “I’m really hopeful [Governor Larry Hogan] will sign it into law and when the public health crisis is over and we focus on growing and rebuilding our economy that expanding commuter rail service will be a part of it.”