Amtrak will begin demolishing properties that it acquired along West North Avenue and North Payson Street in West Baltimore in mid-November as part of its work to build a new $6 billion passenger rail tunnel to serve the city.
Representatives of the private passenger rail company, which is subsidized by the federal government, shared the news at an open house-style meeting at Carver Vocational-Technical High School last month.
The demolition will clear space for the construction of two emergency ventilation facilities for the future tunnel. Phase 1 will bore two new tunnel tubes underneath a two-mile stretch of West Baltimore to replace the 150-year-old B&P Tunnel currently in use.
President Joe Biden, a longtime Amtrak supporter who regularly rode trains from Delaware to Washington, D.C., as a United States senator, touted the project during a visit to Baltimore in January. Standing with Gov. Wes Moore and local officials, Biden pointed to the current tunnel as a notorious bottleneck that causes major backups for Amtrak’s entire Northeast operation. The new tunnel aims to fix that, allowing trains to travel faster than current top speeds in the tunnel.
But many West Baltimore residents told The Baltimore Banner this past summer that they felt left in the dark about how construction would affect their communities. So on Sept. 26, Amtrak experts stood alongside more than a dozen printed information panels and fielded questions from residents about all aspects of the new tunnel program.
Four rowhomes on the northern end of the 1000 block of North Payson Street in Midtown-Edmondson will come down next month in preparation for the construction of the tunnel’s southernmost ventilation facility. Amtrak has negotiated the purchase of the majority of the properties along the block and is currently seeking to acquire the remaining four holdouts through eminent domain.
A member of Amtrak’s property acquisition team declined to comment on the status of the pending eminent domain suit at last week’s meeting. A company spokesperson said that Amtrak will continue demolishing the rest of the block as property acquisitions come through.
The story continues at the Baltimore Banner: Amtrak to begin demolishing properties for new West Baltimore tunnel in November
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