Arlington Cemetery’s Metro station.

Flickr / MrTInDC

Metro is rebuilding platforms at Addison Road in Maryland and Arlington Cemetery in Virginia, which means those stations — along with the entire Blue Line — will be out of commission for a while.

The work is set to begin February 13 and run through May 23.

Metro will run a shuttle bus service between Addison Road and Capitol Heights that comes every six minutes on weekdays and every eight minutes on weekends.

In Virginia, a shuttle will run between Rosslyn and the Pentagon. It will not stop at Arlington Cemetery after 7 p.m. Shuttles will run every 12 minutes on weekdays and every 15 minutes on weekends.

The southern end of the Blue Line, in Virginia, will instead be served by Yellow Line trains, which will run between Franconia-Springfield and Mt. Vernon Square and between Huntington and Greenbelt.

More information on alternative travel is available on WMATA’s website.

Metro is in the middle of a massive project to rebuild concrete platforms that have suffered from decades of use. The transit agency is tearing out the entire platform at each station and adding new amenities, which include installing less-slippery tile, better security cameras, and more modern real-time arrival screens.

The transit agency has usually done that kind of work during lower ridership times in the summer, but Metro says this period was selected because ridership is lower now than it would be in an average summer, thanks to the pandemic. (Metro rides have plummeted by about 90%.) Rehabbing the stations now also allows Metro to avoid doing construction work around “the major events held at Arlington Cemetery,” a WMATA spokesperson said in a presentation to the board.

This summer, the Green and Yellow Line stretch from West Hyattsville to Greenbelt will also close from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

In summer 2022, the Orange Line east of Stadium-Armory will close from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

Filed Under: blue line, construction, metro, metro closures, wmata,