Why are all the Gallery cars on the Manassas Line and all of the Kawasaki cars on the Fredericksburg Line?
The reason for this move is a combination of operations and passenger loads. The brakes on the Kawasaki cars must be inspected over a pit on a regular basis. VRE only has two “pit tracks” one at Ivy City downtown and one at Crossroads in Fredericksburg. To accomplish the brake checks, we have been rotating the Kawasaki equipment between trains, which, while doable, is not optimal operating procedure. While we were looking at the passenger loads in anticipation of adding a refurbished set of Gallery cars, we found that we could better manage the growing VRE population by moving consists (train makeups) and simplify the operations by moving the Kawasaki cars to the Fredericksburg side. Hence, the move that we advertised.
