The inside of the 7000-series railcar. Photo via WMATA
It won’t hover and will still be at the mercy of the rest of Metro’s infrastructure, but the new 7000-series railcars are still pretty fancy. Metro announced on Friday that a full-scale model of the railcar has arrived and will be available for a public unveiling later this week.
The 428 new railcars, purchased at a cost of $886 million, will replace the aging 1000-series cars and service both existing lines and the new Silver Line, which is set to start service next year. They feature new seating arrangements, additional poles for straphangers to grasp when the cars are full and LCD screens that tell you both when you’ve arrived at a station and what you can find at that station.
Another feature of the new cars is an overhead display that shows the location of a train relative to the rest of the line, so less-informed riders (i.e., tourists) will know just how many stops away from their destination they are. When Metro teased out this feature earlier this year, some of the station names on the display were misspelled.
Martin Austermuhle