Photo by cacophony76WMATA announced today it completed the work it intended to do during this past holiday weekend, work which forced the complete closure of three Metro stations, including National Airport, Pentagon City and Crystal City. Metro’s track workers replaced four track switches at the Pentagon City station, along with 2,000 feet of rail and more than 735 ties. They also performed repairs along the National Airport station’s aerial structure, conducted fire line maintenance and installed cable to upgrade cell phone service at those stations.
In the facts and figures department: only 165,000 people took Metrorail trips on Monday, September 7, down significantly from last Labor Day, when Metro served 227,000 people. Free shuttle buses designed to get passengers around the closures served approximately 68,000 people over the course of the entire weekend, though there have been reports of bad signage and communication in terms of how and where to board the buses.
Still, Metro is claiming the weekend’s work, and especially the decision to do it over the holiday weekend, as a victory. The work got done, the agency says doing it this way saved them a ton of money, and fewer riders were affected than if they had done it at a different time.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the very next holiday weekend will see similar closures at three different Metrorail stations: On Columbus Day Weekend, from 9:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 9, through Monday, Oct. 12, the Waterfront-SEU and Archives-Navy Memorial-Penn Quarter stations will close completely, and Green and Yellow Line service will also will be closed at the L’Enfant Plaza station so that Metro can perform the same sort of total switch replacement work at L’Enfant Plaza. In addition, Metro will close the Yellow Line Bridge over the Potomac River to conduct an annual safety inspection and conduct track maintenance. This means that there will be no Yellow Line in the District of Columbia or Maryland over the Columbus Day weekend. The Blue and Orange Line at the L’Enfant Plaza station will not be affected.
The same news release also includes planned single-tracking over the next four weekends in a row in the same area while Metro prepares to perform the switch replacement. Customers should expect delays along the Green and Yellow lines in this area for the next month, and riders accustomed to having Yellow Line extension service to Ft. Totten on the weekends will get four weekends in a row of old-school, to Mt. Vernon Sq. service only.
