Virginia has picked the team for the hardest piece of its biggest rail project. The Virginia Passenger Rail Authority awarded a Skanska and FlatironDragados joint venture a contract worth about $1 billion to build Long Bridge North, a new two-track passenger-rail crossing over the Potomac River between Arlington and Washington. Construction starts this summer.
What the contract covers
Long Bridge North puts a dedicated passenger span next to the century-old bridge that Amtrak, Virginia’s state-supported trains, and CSX freight all share today. The roughly one-mile alignment runs from East Potomac Park to the L’Enfant interlocking on the D.C. side. Two new tracks, the approach structures, and the track connections that let passenger service stop competing with freight for slots.
Why it clears a corridor-wide bottleneck
The existing Long Bridge is the pinch point for the whole Northeast-to-Southeast passenger network. One shared two-track bridge means trains take turns, and there’s no capacity left to add service. Separating passenger traffic onto its own structure is what unlocks the frequency gains Virginia has spent years buying right-of-way to support. It’s also the latest in a run of billion-dollar U.S. rail-bridge awards, and it keeps the region’s largest passenger-rail expansion in decades moving on schedule.
The JV brings deep heavy-civil experience to a technically demanding river crossing. Skanska has worked the Gateway program’s Hudson Tunnel packages; FlatironDragados runs large design-build infrastructure across North America. For riders, the payoff is years out, but the bottleneck finally has a fix under contract.