The Buckingham Branch (CSX) tracks near an Ivy-area crossing Saturday morning.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

Same spot, but looking in the opposite direction on Tuesday morning.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

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Christmas Eve update: This morning, the Northeast Regional departed 7 minutes late but arrived on time in Washington; the Crescent departed 2 minutes late but arrived 28 minutes early.

Since the Hook provided a slideshow of the popular 8:49am Northeast Regional train’s nearly on-time departure on Monday, it seems only fair to follow up with few less sunny details.

First, not only was the 7:20am Crescent booked up on Monday, it was running 5 hours and 37 minutes late into Washington.

On Tuesday, the Crescent was canceled; the Northeast Regional was 58 minutes late into Washington.

Today, Wednesday, the Crescent was 2 hours and 45 minutes late to D.C. By that standard, the NE Regional’s 1 hour, 20-minute late arrival was looking good.

How about the Cardinal, the train that runs east and west? The Chicago-originating train never made it to (more)

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Over 200 climbed aboard Monday. Click for a SLIDESHOW
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

Dozens of folks were wheeling luggage along snowy Main Street Monday morning and then falling or climbing down the large staircase to the Amtrak station, so a reporter went by to see what was up. The train inaugurated on October 1, the Northeast Regional, had been canceled the previous day due to some sort of problem confronting its origination, Lynchburg, said a person familiar with the situation, so there were travelers particularly eager to get moving.

“I’m a regular,” said Russ Perry, who strolled up to the counter just 10 minutes before the 8:49am departure time to buy a ticket. He prefers Train #20, the Crescent, which heads north an hour and a half earlier, to commute to his job running a 200-person architecture and engineering firm in Washington; but the Crescent was all booked up.

Across the crowded waiting room, Christy Strick was glad the train was on time, as she’d just spent two nights in a hotel when she couldn’t get back home to Crozet, and she didn’t want to do that again. She was eagerly (more)

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7:49am Tuesday near Emmet on Ivy Road, where the path is still snow and ice.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

The following is an 8am update of some of the major roads in the area using the “Blackometer,” the Hook’s estimate of the percentage of black asphalt available on key local roads:

• Route 29, South of City - 70%
• Route 29, North of the City: 95%
• Route 250W, Ivy to 29/250 - 80%
• Route 250W, 29/250 to Emmet - 20% and bumpy (c’mon, city crews)
• Emmet Street - 80%
• Main Street - 80%
• Rugby Road - 50%
• Grady Avenue - 60% (but 1.5-lanes in spots)
• Preston Avenue - 80%
• Market Street - 80%
• Barracks Road - 90%
• Old Lynchburg Road - sorry, but we’re not going back there again

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Route 53– the main connection b/w Charlottesville and Fluvanna’s Lake Monticello remains closed.
VDOT WEBSITE

5:30am Tuesday update: the Newsplex reported yesterday afternoon that car-strewn Route 53 has finally reopened, yet eastbound Hydraulic Road near K-Mart has been closed due to icy conditions. (The Hookmobile drove several miles down Rt. 53 at 3pm yesterday to Simeon, but turned around in utter frustration because the lead vehicle in a four-car snake— a dark green Ford truck— refused to go over 15mph despite a “blackometer” level of about 70%.)

Orig. story: Crews are slowly extracting the dozens of abandoned cars along Route 53, southeast of Charlottesville as the Christmas Snowpocalypse enters day four of non-stop, non-stick mayhem.

The Hookmobile went out Monday morning for another tour of Charlottesville and environs. This slideshow shows what we found.

Also, this is the noontime Hook “Blackometer,” the percentage of black asphalt available on a few given streets:
• Route 250W/Ivy Road - 5%
• Emmet Street - 60%
• Main Street - 20%
• Rugby Road - 30%
• Market Street - 40%
• Barracks Road - 50%
• Route 29 South - 60%
• Old Lynchburg Road - 0.00%

Please note that these estimates may change as the day’s sunshine heats up the pavement. And authorities caution nighttime drivers that daytime’s snowmelt can create nighttime’s hazardous black ice.

Archive:
• Saturday’s slideshow
• Sunday’s slideshow

—original headline: “Still closed: Route 53 a mess; so’s everything else”
—second headline misstated closing party’s name: “53’s opened: But now VDOT’s slammed Hydraulic shut”

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A stuck truck, Saturday morning on 29 southbound.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

2:59pm update: new slideshow from Western Albemarle. (previous slideshow).

According to a new release from Albemarle County spokesperson Lee Catlin sent a few minutes before noon, officials allege that Route 29 South— utterly closed since early moments of the snow storm Friday— is now open for its entire length into Nelson County, but Catlin’s release warns that conditions are still very challenging and residents are discouraged from driving “except when absolutely necessary.”

At some point, people will start asking why Central Virginia’s major north-south thoroughfare— a road so important that millions of dollars have been spent studying ways to make its traffic move faster— could have closed when just three inches had fallen and then stayed closed for more than a day and a half.

“We’ll look at this incident as well as everything else that happened during the storm once we get through it,” says VDOT spokesperson Lou Hatter. “Right now we’re trying to get the roads open.”

Hatter says he knows of no other Charlottesville area primary road that remains closed, though he notes that Interstate 81 has had some blockages southwest of here.

As previously reported, the Route 29 stoppage created a multi-mile queue that induced snow-capable cars to turn around but left other cars and practically all  truckers trapped.

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One VDOT snowplow unable to plow any snow. SLIDESHOW
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

“I had no no clue,” said Larry Powell, who set out Friday night from Landover, Maryland, in an 18-wheeler carrying a load of U.S. Mail south along Route 29. Although the heavy snowfall delayed his planned midnight rendezvous with another mail truck coming out of Greensboro, Powell was still trying to reach the Lynchburg exchange point Saturday morning when he had to grind his rig to a halt behind a line of emergency-blinkered rigs lined up near the village of North Garden.

“I was doing fine until I saw the flashing lights,” said Powell, wishing the run had been canceled before he encountered the miles-long queue stretching north from around the Nelson County line.

That was enough to make Ian Judd turn back. Heading home to Lynchburg for the holidays, he drove from New York where he’s a student at the Culinary Institute of America, but he ended up spending Friday night in his car in Charlottesville.

After setting out again Saturday shortly after 8am, he got stuck making a U-turn near North Garden. After a Black Jeeped reporter whipped out some steel tire grippers and an unknown samaritan from a red Jeep pitched in with some elbow grease, Judd got extricated so he could head north for “somewhere warm” in Charlottesville.

“I think I just need to park it,” said Judd.

About three miles north of the spot where Judd got stuck and south of Interstate 64, a VDOT plow— although equipped with tire chains— had nosed itself helplessly into the Route 29 median. About 100 yards away, the steeply sloped ramp to I-64 West was crammed with equally immobilized vehicles.

Around this same time Saturday morning, there were 55 abandoned cars along Route 250 between Ivy and the 29/250 Bypass. But both major fuel stations along that stretch, the Shell and the Bellair Market, were open for business.

Bellair owner Pat Pitts admitted that she opened the popular gourmet food and gas shop 30 minutes later than the usual starting time of 6am. Normally, she’d keep the place open to 11pm. “But if it stays the way it is now,” said Pitts, as snow continued to steadily fall, “maybe we’ll close at dark.”

–updated Sunday, January 3 with minor clarifying details

–orig. headline: “Beautiful gridlock: Major roads were slow going or no going”

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Westbound Route 250 traffic, seen from the Toddsbury lot at 6:56pm, crawled through the village of Ivy.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

Commuter vehicles driven without appropriate equipment or skills are scattered like toys tonight, as the first two inches of what could become a two-foot snowfall brought Charlottesville-Albemarle transportation to a near standstill.

There were two vehicles stopped on westbound Route 250 Bypass just west of the McIntire Road exit around 6:15pm, turning the normal commuter artery into a capillary. Meanwhile, on Interstate 64, traffic never got above 30mph, and several drivers— apparently traumatized by the concept of driving in snow— were running with their emergency blinkers.

The situation in Albemarle on Dick Woods Road bordered on the ridiculous, as a reporter counted nine vehicles nosed into ditches along a half-mile stretch near Ivy Depot.

Two cars that smashed together head-on on Route 250 west of Morgantown Road stalled traffic and made for a 3 1/2-hour commute from downtown Charlottesville to Crozet for those leaving around 4:30pm. On Ivy Road heading west, speeds at times reached 5mph until grinding to a soul-deadening halt for hours. Route 240 and its uphill trajectory also proved tricky for autos without four- or front-wheel drive, causing further delays.

“It’s surprising that the salt is not doing as good a job as it usually does,” said City spokesperson Ric Barrick, who reserved blame for the havoc on commuters who waited downtown too long and set out without four-wheel-drive vehicles.

“We’ll start plowing when it gets to three inches, so that should start shortly,” Barrick said at 7:25pm. “VDOT hasn’t started plowing yet either.”

Barrick explained that plows require sufficient snow to create a buffer between blade and pavement to avoid injuring the asphalt.

Updated 9:16pm December 18.

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The northbound lane of U.S. 29 south tries to capture motorists’ attention.
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

The billboard may not win a Clio. But all Albemarle County Police really want is to stop the carnage on U.S. 29 south of Charlottesville.

Unlike its more heavily traveled counterpart north of town, the southern Monacan Trail end of U.S. 29 is usually a pretty easy, uncongested drive. So when the 2009 death toll between I-64 and the Nelson County line reached seven by October, Albemarle County Police looked for a way to slam the brakes on those grim statistics.

“It’s a disturbing trend,” says Lieutenant Todd Hopwood, who noted December 17 that there were no fatalities on 29 South the previous four years. Yet during the last week of October, two accidents took three lives in a couple days, and within a quarter-mile of each other. One was activist farmer Kathryn Russell, who was struck crossing 29 at Plank Road October 22 and thrown from her truck.

Why the sudden spate of deaths? Police found two things in common: five of the seven were not wearing seatbelts, and five were from out of town.

In a multi-agency effort, Albemarle police have stepped up patrols and added  rumble strips and a radar-equipped, your-speed-is sign.

AAA of the Mid-Atlantic sprang for the $1,500 billboard near Crossroads Store that warns of the strict enforcement. The billboard went up December 7 for the holidays and will go up again in the spring, says AAA’s Windy VanCuren.

The buckle-up warnings have been repeated a million times before, but with seven deaths in a short stretch of road and short period of time, VanCuren hopes the message sinks in: “Most of these could have been avoided.”

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