The Federal Highway Administration has approved a preferred construction alternative for CSX‘s Virginia Avenue Tunnel project, enabling CSX to complete the tunnel’s design and initiate the construction permitting process.
The decision marks the completion of an extensive environmental review of the project conducted jointly with the District of Columbia Department of Transportation. The review incorporates three years of input from residents, businesses and government agencies in the southeast Washington, D.C., neighborhood around the tunnel, CSX said in a news release.
The feds approved a proposal to modernize the 110-year old tunnel which will improve the flow of freight traffic through the District of Columbia and eliminate a rail-traffic bottleneck that also impacts commuter and passenger trains in the region. The new structure will accommodate trains that can carry enough freight to remove the equivalent of 280 trucks per train from the nation’s highways.
