Going Out Of Our Way To Serve Our Customers

The opening of the new Middlebury Tunnel in September 2020, after a 10-week construction shutdown, meant that VRS customers throughout the Champlain Valley could once again be served directly using the Rutland to Burlington route. When the tunnel project was in the planning stages one of the major hurdles was figuring out how customers north of Middlebury would receive the same level of daily service during the track outage. Fortunately, with the support of both our partners at VTrans and our interchange partner New England Central Railroad, we were able to develop a detour routing from Bellows Falls to Burlington utilizing the NECR. VRS crews were qualified to operate over the line by NECR personnel, and two special sets of locomotives were leased by the state to provide the additional motive power needed to move the trains over the route.

The detour was a team effort, with employees from departments throughout VRS coming together to ensure that the trains ran safely and on schedule. Thanks to their efforts, customers experienced little or no changes in the level of personalized service they have come to expect from VRS.