[Scan-DC] Railfanning the Braddock Road Metro station

[Blair Thompson]

Railfanning the Braddock Road Metro station.

Executive summary: they don't encourage it.

Usually when I go home from work, I take a Metrorail Yellow Line train from downtown DC to the Pentagon and transfer there to a DASH bus into Alexandria. With the return of nice weather, though, I have been taking the train all the way to the Braddock Road Metro station and transferring to the bus there. The Metro tracks there are adjacent to the CSX mainline, so if you take a few (or several) minutes between leaving the train and getting on the bus, you might see a few CSX freights, Amtrak passenger trains, or VRE commuter trains. I did just that last Wednesday afternoon, accompanied by my analog Bearcat SC-180B scanner equipped with the rubber ducky antenna and Ni-Cd battery pack. 

At the Braddock Road station, the entrance and kiosk are at the lower (street) level, and you take an escalator, stairs, or elevator up one level to the track level. IIRC, you can see the Capitol dome and maybe the control tower at Washington National Airport to the north from the platform if there are no trains parked in the way on the CSX tracks. There was a Herzog ballast train parked on the Number 1 track last Wednesday. The tracks are numbered 1 through 3 from east to west. You can easily see the northbound signal bridge over the three CSX tracks for the Slaters Lane Control Point at railroad milepost 106.3. This gives you early warning of northbound trains, even before they hit radio range, as you can see if the CSX dispatcher has set up any signals for northbound traffic. You will not need binoculars to read the signals.

To the south, you can see the north end of the Metrorail King Street station. Alexandria Union Station is just barely out of view, as the tracks headed south from Braddock Road curve toward the west. In terms of radios, if you had a one-channel radio, you would want it set on 161.550 MHz, which has been an RF&P frequency forever. All the CSX, Amtrak, and VRE trains use this frequency, as does the defect detector at Slaters Lane. 160.410 MHz is a secondary CSX frequency that sees less use. You can also hear 160.995 MHz, used by Amtrak at the Ivy City car yards north of DC Union Station.

Northbound rains on the Norfolk Southern can be heard at 160.950 MHz as they near the junction with the old RF&P at AF Tower. You can hear the train crew say "Let's go to 161.55" when they prepare to enter CSX territory. Southbound trains on the RF&P can be heard calling the southbound signal at Seminary, which is at milepost 103.9. I even heard trains on the old B&O frequencies of 160.230 MHz and 160.320 MHz, and those frequencies are used north of DC Union Station in the directions of Silver Spring and Hyattsville. 

So to review, if you have 160.230, 160.320, 160.950, 160.995, 161.410, and 161.550 MHz programmed in you scanner, or those six crystals, you are good to go. You might want to consider just one more, as I will explain later.

Last Wednesday afternoon, I stood at the south end of the platform, right where the Metro train operator opens the window of his cab and looks back to see how loading and unloading are proceeding. At first, they gave me a wary glance, but my explanation that I was spying on their neighbors, CSX, sufficed, as did the explanation that with an analog scanner I couldn't hear their frequencies anyway. One Metro operator even volunteered that Metro would be going all-digital soon. As long as you let them know you aren't performing surveillance on them, they won't get upset.

The highlight of the day for me was seeing an "approach limited" (yellow over flashing green) signal on northbound Number 2 track on the Slaters Lane signal bridge change to "clear," green over red. A few minutes later, a northbound train went by. Can it get any better than that? 

Finally, after I had been there a while and had seen several trains go by on CSX, a Metro train operator opened his window and said to me in a friendly way that I should watch out, as Metrorail took notice of people who spent a lot of time standing at the edge or the end of the platform. I replied, also in a friendly way, that I ought to be moving along before the police showed up. He replied that they were already on the way; he had heard it on the radio. I thanked him, packed up my stuff, and high-tailed it out of there. I had an encounter with Amtrak police back in December 2009, and I didn't feel that I wanted a repeat of that, especially since a discussion might quickly go in the direction of "I see your name is already in The System." I was not using headphones, but there was no one anywhere near me. The SC-180B's headphone jack is wired for the stereo headphones that are used with all mp3 players, and I had a pair of those headphones on me. I use the headphones when I listen to the scanner aboard Metrobuses.

Note to self: add 161.385, WMATA police to that bank. Do they still use that analog frequency, or have the WMATA police migrated to a digital frequency?

I can provide a link to a website with the track diagram and an explanation of what all those signals mean, but I'm not sure how CSX feels about the idea. Please drop me a line for that.

Thanks for reading this.

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