BALTIMORE — Just hours after empty coal train E730 rolled through the Howard Street Tunnel at 3:35 a.m. Feb. 1, a small army of contractors and CSX workers arrived to begin removing the 1.7-mile tunnel’s single track.
The 100-car coal train was the last through the 1895 Baltimore & Ohio tunnel, which will be shut down for six to eight months as work on the double-stack clearance project continues around the clock, seven days a week.
For now that means detouring 16 scheduled trains per day — five merchandise pairs, two pairs of intermodal trains, and two locals — plus unscheduled unit train moves of coal, grain, and other bulk commodities.
CSX is using a couple of detour routes over rival Norfolk Southern.
One relies on existing trackage rights over NS between Youngstown and Ashtabula, Ohio, a route that links the former B&O main line with the former New York Central Water Level Route. This allows traffic to bypass Howard Street by running around the horn via Cumberland, Md., and Buffalo and Selkirk, N.Y.
“We began to route trains daily via the Youngstown Branch in a phased approach about five months ago while we had ongoing track work north and in the tunnel in anticipation of the full closure. We are currently routing two merchandise train pairs over this route,” railroad spokeswoman Sheriee Bowman says.
Second, on Feb. 1 CSX began using temporary trackage rights over NS between Hagerstown, Md., and Philadelphia. “We are currently rerouting four trains a day,” Bowman says.
While the tunnel is closed, CSX has truncated its Philadelphia-Jacksonville, Fla., intermodal train pair, I032/I033. The hotshots now originate or terminate at Curtis Bay Yard in Baltimore, which is south of the tunnel.
Executives say the railroad has preserved service for every customer that uses trains that previously were routed through the Howard Street Tunnel, even if it means trucking some freight to its final destinations.
Up to 200 people are working on the Howard Street Tunnel itself, as well as the three remaining bridge clearance projects north of the tunnel, says Brandon Knapp, the railroad’s Baltimore-based senior director of design and construction.
CSX is increasing clearance to 21 feet by excavating the tunnel floor and installing new precast concrete inverts that will be tied into the tunnel’s existing footing. “The top of rail in most locations is going down between two and three feet, so we’ll be excavating down about five feet in most locations to be able to build back up,” Knapp says.
One of the challenges of working in a tunnel, Knapp says, is that there’s only two ways in and out. Crews will deliver new construction material via the north portal, while excavated material will be removed via the south portal. CSX will shuttle the material to its Mount Winans Yard in air dump gondola cars. Bayview Yard will serve as a secondary dump site for what’s expected to be the removal of 27,000 cubic yards of ballast, brick, and soil from the tunnel floor.
Another challenge: Managing the water that constantly seeps into the tunnel. “This is a free-draining tunnel. There is quite a bit of water that comes in here,” Knapp says.
Howard Street, a major city thoroughfare, and the Baltimore light rail system run above the tunnel. “We certainly don’t expect to have any impact on the neighborhood above,” Knapp says.
But just in case, an array of sensors is keeping an eye out for any ground movement up on the surface. “We’ve worked with the city and worked with the MTA to be able to install those monitoring points to make sure that we’re getting good information,” Knapp says. “If we’re seeing any sort of movement, we’ll take action.”
One of the adjacent bridge clearance projects is anything but run of the mill.
The four-arch North Avenue stone bridge — just north of the north tunnel portal — spans CSX, Amtrak, and Baltimore light rail tracks, as well as Jones Falls. Overlapping infrastructure in the compact area complicates matters: The CSX main line sits atop Amtrak’s B&P Tunnel.
“It’s a very interesting structure. It’s the location where the Amtrak B&P Tunnel comes underneath us,” Knapp says. “We actually sit essentially on a bridge over top of their tunnel, and then we have North Avenue over the top of us.”
That, of course, meant that the only way to gain clearance was to go up. CSX is replacing one of the stone arches with a steel girder span. Clearance work is wrapping up at Guilford Avenue, while the Harford Avenue and North Avenue projects aren’t expected to be completed until early 2026. “We’re doing our best right now to help accelerate that schedule,” Knapp says.
Once construction is complete — including the bridge clearance projects — CSX will be able to run double-stack intermodal service in the I-95 Corridor.
CSX also will be able to provide double-stack service between Chicago and the Port of Baltimore for the first time via the former B&O main. The railroad began double-stack service to the port in October after final clearance work was completed on bridges between Philadelphia and Baltimore. The service links the port with Chicago and other Midwestern destinations – but currently via the roundabout Philadelphia-New Jersey-Selkirk-Cleveland route that’s about 350 miles longer than the direct route via the B&O.
The Howard Street project has been a long time coming. CSX had discussed it for two decades, but the estimated $1 billion to $3 billion price tag was a show stopper.
“We’ve been talking about Howard Street my entire career — 20 years,” Chief Financial Officer Sean Pelkey says. “And forever it was ‘Howard Street is the bottleneck in the network. It will never be fixed.’”
Funding for the $566 million project includes $247.5 million from the state of Maryland, $170.75 million from CSX, $125 million from the Federal Railroad Administration, and $22.75 million from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. The project includes the tunnel itself as well as 22 bridges between Baltimore and Philadelphia.
The Howard Street Tunnel was the centerpiece of the B&O’s Baltimore Belt Line, which was built between 1890 and 1895 to create a through route through the city. The Belt Line – the first electrified railroad in the U.S. – allowed the B&O to connect its yard in Mount Clare, on the west side of Baltimore, to Bayview Junction on the east side.
When built, the Howard Street Tunnel was 7,341 feet long and consisted of three sections: A 300-foot cut-and-cover section at the south end; a 5,900-foot section bored through rock and loose soil; and a 1,150-foot cut-and-cover section.
A pair of 20th century projects extended the tunnel to its current 8,700-foot length. In 1982, CSX extended the tunnel south by 1,393 feet as part of construction of the elevated Interstate 395. In the early 1990s, the southern end was extended by another 50 feet to allow the new light rail line to cross the CSX track.
Knapp says he’s impressed with the craftsmanship and design of the brick-lined tunnel. “The tunnel is still in actually very good condition,” he says.
In a separate project begun last year, CSX has completed a reconfiguration of the yard in Cumberland, Md., that nearly doubles the flat-switching capacity of the former hump yard [see “Cumberland Yard improvements …,” Trains News Wire, March 11, 2025]. This has allowed the former Baltimore & Ohio main line to handle merchandise traffic moving between the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest that had been routed the long way around via Selkirk, N.Y., on the former New York Central Water Level Route.
