Citing civil rights complaint, neighbors push back on Amtrak’s new Baltimore tunnel: ‘We’re taking it to a war’

Amtrak presented plans for a new tunnel through working-class black neighborhoods as a foregone conclusion Wednesday night.

An elementary school auditorium full of Baltimoreans wasn’t so sure.

“Since your plans don’t want to meet us on our grounds, we’re going to meet you on another ground. You chose the battle, and we’re taking it to a war,” West Baltimore resident Deborah Morris told Amtrak officials.

At the first in-person meeting hosted by the rail company since a coalition of neighbors filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Transportation to halt the construction of the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, residents raised concerns about pollution and structural racism.

The Reservoir Hill Association is represented by New York University School of Law’s Civil Rights and Racial Justice Clinic in the complaint under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which allows federal agencies to block the recipients of federal funding from implementing programs that have an “unjustified discriminatory impact.”

The existing 150-year-old Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel is about 1.4 miles long, consists of three small tunnels connected by short openings, and runs southwest and west out of Penn Station through the Bolton Hill, Madison Park, Sandtown-Winchester and Upton neighborhoods. According to Amtrak, the tunnel has water damage and a sinking floor, and forces trains to slow to no more than 30 mph, causing frequent delays.

The new $6 billion tunnel would be 3.7 miles and head northwest and west out of Penn Station through the Reservoir Hill, Penn North, Sandtown-Winchester, Bridgeview/Greenlawn, Midtown-Edmondson and Penrose/Fayette neighborhoods before meeting existing tracks west of Maryland Route 1. Earlier this year, Amtrak filed lawsuits in federal court to acquire a handful of residential and commercial properties in the 2000 block of West Lanvale Street through eminent domain, near where the proposed tunnel would exit. Work on tracks and drainage started last year, tunnel boring is planned to start in 2026, and the project is scheduled to be finished in 2035, according to Amtrak.

According to a “record of decision” from 2017, when the Federal Railroad Administration signed off on the project, a “no-build” option to use the site of the existing tunnel was dismissed for not reducing travel time. The three finalist routes Amtrak considered all curved north to pass through the Reservoir Hill, Penn North, Sandtown-Winchester, Bridgeview/Greenlawn, Midtown-Edmondson and Penrose/Fayette neighborhoods.

On Wednesday night, residents questioned why a more direct route was not selected.

“The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. That route that is going through our neighborhoods is inequitable,” Reservoir Hill resident Angel St. Jean said at the meeting.

According to the document, the selected route “would have substantial beneficial impacts on transportation that outweigh the physical impacts of constructing the [route]”.

The civil rights complaint claims that construction would disproportionately harm Black and low-income communities and that Amtrak has not done enough to gather community feedback. At Mount Royal Elementary School in Bolton Hill on Wednesday night, Amtrak officials spent most of the two-hour meeting talking about the windows, landscaping and other aesthetics of three new ventilation facilities.

Odessa Phillip, a contracted spokesperson who ran the meeting for Amtrak, asked attendees to download a smartphone app and vote on different color choices or other exterior details.

“If you prefer the bay window option, the color preference choices would be black charcoal, cream or olive green,” Phillip said to increasingly gasps and groans over an hour into the meeting.

Residents pushed back, raising concerns about pollution from the ventilation systems as well as freight trains running below their homes carrying hazardous materials.

“It feels as though our voices are being muzzled,” St. Jean told Phillip during a question-and-answer session. “We’re going through these designs and being asked to weigh in on designs when our actual concerns are not being addressed. I don’t care about the windows.”

Residents are especially concerned about a ventilation facility directly across from Dorothy I. Height Elementary School in Reservoir Hill. An Amtrak consultant said Wednesday night that the facility would be operated only during an emergency such as a fire.

“We’re talking about an emergency that will never happen,” an Amtrak consultant said at the meeting.

“Oh, it will happen,” said Joan Pullian, a 20-year resident of Reservoir Hill said.

According to Amtrak, emissions associated with the ventilation facilities will not violate air quality standards established by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Amtrak officials reiterated Wednesday that the Frederick Douglass Tunnel is for electrified passenger trains. The current Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel does handle freight from Norfolk Southern Railway, and according to the record-of-decision document signed by a Federal Railroad Administration associate administrator, freight is not out of the question for the new tunnel.

“The Project has been designed not to preclude freight traffic through the tunnels, including double-stack freight,” the document reads.

“One, we would like a commitment of no freight under our home. Two, we don’t want a ventilation facility across the street from a school, and three, we would rather have a more equitable route for the tunnel,” St. Jean said.

Amtrak is hosting meetings about the project bimonthly . The next virtual meeting is scheduled for July 1 and the next in-person one is July 10.