Photo by Chris Rief aka Spodie Odie.

And now, the bad news: WMATA might not be extending headways over weekends, but they will be performing quite a bit of weekend work which will close stations and force detours.

According to a statement released this afternoon, WMATA will temporarily close “individual stations or clusters of stations” and replace trains with buses on “about two of every three weekends over the next 18 months” to facilitate work needed to comply with National Transportation Safety Board recommendations. Earlier this year, Metro announced a rigorous schedule of shutdowns over three-day weekends — this plan appears to be an extension of that, an attempt by Metro to speed up state of good repair fixes requested by the NTSB after the 2009 crash outside Fort Totten which killed nine people. The acceleration is expected to chop about a year off the project’s timeline.

“Our new approach will enable us to get more work done, more safely and more effectively with less overtime, while inconveniencing fewer customers than we otherwise would given the massive rebuilding effort we’re undertaking,” according to the statement released by Richard Sarles, Metro’s General Manager and Chief Executive Officer.

The schedule of planned station closures will be released to the public “in the near future.”