The Silver Spring Penguin

ROCKVILLE — The full county council on Tuesday showed nothing but love for a light-rail Purple Line ride, but they’d like to check out one more thing: the possibility of running east- and westbound trains on a single track along some parts of the Capital Crescent Trail.

“One of the critical things about rapid transit is that it has to be reliable and predictable. You can’t have trains arriving late, and trains that stack up on one another,” council member Marc Elrich (D-At large) said to state reps. “But if [single tracking] saves money and doesn’t affect your ability to operate the line, then I hope you’ll look at it.”

Single tracking that Bethesda-to-New Carrollton ride could soften its impact through Chevy Chase, said council member Roger Berliner (D-District 1), who proposed the study. Most trees along the trail will meet the ax to make way for overhead electrical wires, admitted Mike Madden, who manages this project for the state.

But rolling two trains on one track has its drawbacks, Madden testified. Back in the day, Baltimore’s light-rail line ran on a single track through some routes, and that saved the state some money up front on construction, he said. But the system paid it back in “impacts and angst.”

“When you have only one track and have to do maintenance, you have to shut down that whole track,” he warned. Train operators also would need spot-on timing to prevent scheduling conflicts, he said.

Nonetheless, five of the council’s eight members said they wanted the state to look into it. Opposition came from Dem members George Leventhal, Duchy Trachtenberg and Valerie Ervin.

“In Chevy Chase, there may be a certain quality-of-life issues related to the trail, but in East Silver Spring, those quality-of-life issues are different,” Ervin, who reps the downtown area, told her colleagues. More than 60 percent of people living along Purple Line routes rent their cribs, and many are recent immigrants, she spelled out.

“A significant conversation has to take place on how to revitalize those neighborhoods on the [Purple Line's] eastern end,” Ervin read from a prepared statement. “Our developing communities deserve the same level of service as those developed communities.”

Leventhal worried that a single-track study would throw a red herring in the Purple Line’s path, and that placating concerns on one end of the system would only open cans of worms somewhere else. “We can’t micromanage this project,” he told his colleagues.

The one thing that all agreed on was further study of a tunnel beneath Wayne Avenue. According to Jonathan Jay, vice president of the Seven Oaks-Evanswood Citizens Association, a tunnel would allow the mass-transit project to bypass downtown ’s congested streets as it worms its way to Long Branch.

But project manager Madden warned that tunneling could create more havoc by widening the route’s 48-foot berth to 80 feet at Mansfield Road. A ball field and a smaller park near Sligo Creek also could be impacted, he told the council. Still, the state would explore the possibility of a Wayne Avenue tunnel, Madden said.

Photo of Sacramento’s light-rail system courtesy of Flickr user PaulKimo9.