The Baltimore Light Rail is once again making stops at Penn Station after a nearly three-year hiatus, the Maryland Transit Administration said.

The north-south rail line, which runs from Hunt Valley in Baltimore County to BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport and Glen Burnie in Anne Arundel County, passes just west of the Central Baltimore intercity rail hub. Northbound trains can use a short rail spur to divert from the typical path after exiting the Mount Royal/MICA station, cross Interstate 83 and enter the station.

But the MTA had to suspend this service in fall 2022 because of track and platform work at Penn Station, which is operated and maintained by Amtrak.

The station is the only direct connection point between any of Baltimore’s various train lines, long criticized for not integrating with one another more seamlessly. It serves Amtrak, one of the MTA’s MARC commuter lines, and the light rail, but not Baltimore’s subway. While light rail service was suspended there, riders had to exit the train at Mount Royal and walk roughly a quarter mile to get to Penn Station.

Not all northbound trains will make the diversion to Penn Station, but all that do will be clearly marked, an MTA spokesperson wrote in an email. Trains restarted the routes Sunday, and 39 trips will go into Penn Station on weekdays.

The announcement is the latest in a series of steps forward for a mass transit line that had taken several steps back in recent years.

In late 2023, the MTA shut the light rail line down for two weeks after complications with major rehabilitation work on the fleet of 53 light rail vehicles prompted safety concerns. Once the MTA could restore service, it could only do so with a fraction of its train cars.

The rehabilitation of the fleet, a standard move to ensure train cars reach the end of their “useful life” without major issues, was long overdue when private rail company Alstom began reconstructing the vehicles. Problems stemming from that work arose after they began returning the vehicles to Maryland to go back into service.

Today, an average of about 30 of the 52 train cars are available for service on any given day, according to an agency spokesperson.

Ridership numbers have crept back up since plummeting during the pandemic and again two Decembers ago after the shutdown. And service has run a bit more smoothly during high-demand times, like for Orioles home games, as more train cars have come back into service.

Last year, the federal government awarded the MTA a $213 million grant to support the purchase of a new fleet of light rail trains, part of a larger modernization effort. Stations will need to be retrofitted so that the new trains run smoothly, and crews will replace the Howard Street corridor tracks, among other upgrades.

But it will be a long wait. The MTA expects to award a contract for the new railcars by next fall, and to begin incorporating them into service sometime in 2031.