Photo by it used to be me.

The Bethesda Metro station reopened this afternoon after a 40 minute closure—the second time in a month that an escalator outage shuttered the station.

Red Line: Trains are now servicing Bethesda, escalator service has been restored.

— Metrorail Info (@Metrorailinfo) July 23, 2015

Red Line trains also temporarily bypassed the Bethesda station on July 8 for more than an hour in the morning because of an escalator issue (it needed a handrail repair). That combined with a signal problem at Grosvenor wreaked havoc on Red Line riders’ commute.

The ascending escalator was also the culprit in today’s outage though a spokesman didn’t know the exact source of the problem.

The bank of three escalators, some of the longest in the Western Hemisphere, are undergoing a two-and-a-half year replacement project slated to last until the spring of 2017. WMATA began the process of replacing one escalator at a time—to leave two in operation at all times—last October (unlike the Dupont Circle project, which had another entrance that could be utilized).

The first escalator replacement is just about done, said Metro spokesman Richard Jordan. The transit agency is just waiting for a state inspection to return it to service.

But any time that one of the two remaining escalators (supposedly) in service need to be repaired, the whole station has to be bypassed for “safety reasons,” Jordan said. In those cases, Metro runs shuttle buses to and from the Medical Center station.

According to D.C. Metro Metrics, the two escalators currently being used are operational 94.75 percent and 94.49 percent of the time.