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Thanks to This Week's Advertisers
Greetings, fellow Metro riders, and welcome to yet another edition of Should You Even Bother Riding the Metro this Weekend? Based on the weekend track maintenance schedule WMATA has just released, our answer is likely "hell no." Track work is going to affect each and every Metro line this weekend.
Red Line: Tunnel repairs and other work replacing rail fasteners between Medical Center and Friendship Heights will add 30 minute delays while trains share one track between those two stations from 10 p.m. on Friday, July 31, to closing (midnight), on Sunday, August 2.
And every other Red Line train traveling in the direction of Shady Grove will terminate at Friendship Heights and return to Glenmont on Saturday and Sunday from 7 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Red Line trains will operate only every 20 minutes between Shady Grove and Medical Center.
Blue and Orange Lines: Bridge maintenance on the aerial structure outside the Stadium-Armory station will lead to 30 minute delays while trains share a single track between Eastern Market and Stadium-Armory from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday, August 1, and Sunday, August 2.
Green and Yellow Lines: Rail replacement work between Georgia Ave-Petworth and U St/African-Amer Civil War Memorial/Cardozo will cause 30 minute delays while trains share one track between those two locations starting from 8 p.m., Friday, July 31, and lasting to 6 p.m., on Sunday, August 2.
During the rail work, all Yellow Line trains will operate only every 12 to 14 minutes, and only between Huntington and Mt. Vernon Sq-7th St Convention Center. No Yellow Line trains will extend to Fort Totten this weekend.
Blue and Yellow Lines: Work to tamp down rail tacks between Braddock Road and Van Dorn Street (Blue Line) and Huntington (Yellow Line) will cause delays of up to 30 minutes between these locations from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday, August 1, and Sunday, August 2.
Blue Line trains will operate only every 12 to 15 minutes, split into two sections: between Franconia-Springfield and King Street, and between Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and Largo Town Center. Blue line trains will not service the Braddock Road station on Saturday and Sunday.
Motorists who park at Franconia-Springfield or Van Dorn Street should consider parking outside the Huntington station instead.
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UUGGGHHHHHHH! I live at King street, and two weeks ago this was absolute torture to get into DC. Lost tourists and grumpy Metro employees to boot.
Screw this, I am taking the boats into Georgetown.
Right with you. Yellow line is so disenfranchised I can't stand it. My morning Metro alerts might as well read: "Disruption somewhere on Yellow. Update to status as soon as we find it. Or feel like it. Expect delays and suck it."
Great! That's 15-30 extra minutes of dealing with the tourists who decides to block all gates; stand IN FRONT of the train doors blocking those who needs to exit; and causing escalator traffic because they don't know that they should be standing right.
Thank god. Fast and efficient rail service just wigs me out. In other news, "tamp down" is declared the next awesome meme. Tamp it down, Molly! Tamp it!
So are the WMATA personnel who work on the rails considered gandy dancers, or do you have to work on "real" railroads to get that appelation?
Also: gah! The one weekend in the last few I might be using the Metro, there is track work everywhere!
Oh what the hell. They have done more work in the Medical Center tunnel than I've had done on my face - and both projects have been pretty much useless. Time to break out the human pony cart this weekend.
Not that NYC has the finest subway in the world, but at least it isn't rendered useless almost every weekend...and it's open 24 hours a day!!! Can someone please explain why WMATA is unable to make enough use of the 33 hours of downtime every week that it must cause ridiculous delays and service cuts every stinkin weekend?
Sure.
I guess no one from WMATA ever thought of hiring maintenance crews to actually work during 3rd shift hours. If they already do do that then they're not working hard enough. They wonder why the system breaks down so often? Because they perform half-@$$ jobs during their day-time maintenance.
Well the key difference here is that NYC SUbway was built with several lanes of track for each line they run, they can run a train through the same route but use multiple tracks once they enter the tunnels, freeing up some at night for maintenence. That's why they can also do express routes that bypass some stations, using the middle most tracks in between the two with platform access... Unforunately, the designers of our system thought of it more as a novelty than a usable system, they put a lot of money and time into the visual appeal but not alot into the ridership (which they never guessed would exceed 250,000). Metro has only one track per direction per line, so when they work on one side, they're forced to switch to using the only other track they have on that line.
On top of the physical limitations, the other explaination is simple; Metro simply hasn't kept up on its maintenence for whatever reason (it varies depending on who you ask) and so the repair needs got stacked up so bad that they can never catch up no matter how much they do.
Crippeling the crippled system even further, fantastic... F**K! This really irks me--Metro acts like nobody uses the system on weekends--do they not realize there are a lot of people who LIVE here and NEED to use Metro even on weekends?! I mean come on! Every single line?! You people are just jerkin' us around now WMATA!!!