Copyright 2000 The Washington Post
The Washington
Post
April 29, 2000, Saturday, Final Edition
SECTION: METRO; Pg. B05
LENGTH: 333 words
HEADLINE:
Glitch Snags Commute on MARC, VRE; Software Problem Is Blamed for Delayed,
Canceled Trains
BYLINE: Lyndsey Layton , Washington
Post Staff Writer
BODY:
Early morning
trains on the VRE and MARC commuter lines through suburban
Washington were canceled or delayed yesterday after a software problem involving
the dispatching center for CSX Transportation in Jacksonville, Fla., knocked out
the railroads' communications system.
The communications shutdown, the
third in recent months, was repaired by 6:50 a.m., railroad officials said. CSX
is a freight railroad company that owns track in 23 states east
of the Mississippi River and controls traffic on many of the region's
commuter rail lines. CSX spokesman Rob Gould said the software
problem developed at 4:30 a.m. as MCI-WorldCom was performing maintenance work
on a communications system used by CSX.
He said the problem affected a
host of other MCI customers and was beyond the control of CSX. "Our
communications provider was the problem here. We were a victim in this," Gould
said.
Gould said 1,000 CSX trains were canceled or delayed as more than
18,000 miles of railroad had to be shut down.
Virginia Railway Express
service on the Fredericksburg line was halted from 5:30 to 6:50 a.m., spokesman
Matt Benka said. Trains on the Manassas line were not affected.
"We
froze in place," Benka said. "Everything that we had going, we just held and
restarted at 6:50 a.m." He said the longest delay on the line was 90 minutes.
On the MARC system, four of the seven morning trains on the Brunswick
line were canceled and five of nine trains on the Camden line were canceled,
MARC spokesman Frank Fulton said. Trains on the Penn line are run by Amtrak, and
they were not affected.
Metro honored all VRE and MARC tickets.
The problem affected automatic control devices that guide crews on such
operations as stopping, starting and slowing down.
CSX has been
criticized for not having a backup communications system.
"It amazes me
that in today's high-tech world . . . a company that's been around so long has
not effectively built a redundancy system," Benka said.
LOAD-DATE: April 29, 2000
