The Purple Line Trains Will Go as Fast as 55 Miles Per Hour
Tracks for the Purple Line are now fully complete in Prince George’s County.
Engineers are regularly testing light rail cars on sections of the track near the Route 1 corridor, expanding from the one-mile stretch they had been exclusively testing earlier.
On a recent test drive with a reporter from News4,a train reached speeds of up to 50 mph, close to the maximum speed of 55 mph. They’ll mostly be reaching those speeds on long, straight stretches without intersections between stops, such as along Veterans Parkway.
Each train is 142 feet long and can hold a maximum of 432 people. Nineteen of the 28 light rail vehicles have been delivered.
For a recent Bethesda Magazine article, journalist Louis Peck interviewed two dozen people who have worked on the project about the cost overruns and delays.
The main reasons cited are the federal lawsuit from Chevy Chase residents over environmental concerns, underestimates of the difficulty of putting a new light rail line in a densely populated area and a complex public-private partnership that unraveled right as the Covid pandemic hit.
The Purple Line is currently slated to open in 2027, nearly 10 years after construction began.
On campus drive, not too far East of Route 1 there is a manhole cover in the newly paved roadway that is 1″ or more below the surface of the roadway. This needs to be corrected immediately. The manhole cover needs to be cut out and raised to the grade of the roadway paving and the area around the cover repaved. This is something that should not have happened in the first place.