Metro says it will bring back eight 7000-series trains on Thursday. Officials held a final safety meeting Wednesday.

The meeting included “internal stakeholders to confirm operational readiness,” per a memo to elected leaders. The Washington Metrorail Safety Commission was invited to participate. WMATA wants to make sure the trains are ready and finalize details before they go back into passenger service.

Metro has previously said riders will first see the trains on the Green and Yellow lines. The transit agency says once they’ve established a “steady rhythm of inspections and consistently delivered eight trains for daily service,” they will increase service on the Blue, Orange, and Silver lines to every 15 minutes — that’s better than the current trains every 20 minutes.

The trains, which represent 60% of the fleet, have been mostly sidelined for the past 240 days. The Safety Commission ordered the trains off the tracks after an October derailment on the Blue Line caused by wheels moving too far apart. Further investigation revealed that the issue was plaguing an entire subset of the fleet. Metro has yet to identify the root cause or a permanent fix for the problem, leading some riders to question whether the cars are safe.

Metro says it can manage the problem through daily inspections of the wheels with digital measuring tools, a plan the Safety Commission has signed off on. Metro testing and data analysis found that inspection every 10 days was sufficient to find any movements in the wheel.

The eight trains represent about 9% of the fleet of 93 trains. Metro officials say they will provide more reliability and allow for use of more “gap” trains that fill a need during busy events or rush hours. Metro has had to rely on its 2000, 3000, and 6000-series trains, some of which are nearly 40 years old.

The limited number of trains has severely hampered service levels, with trains coming every 20 minutes on the Blue, Orange, and Silver lines, every 15 minutes on the Green and Yellow lines, and every 10 minutes on the Red Line. Rush hour trains have been packed to the gills in recent weeks.

Metro says service levels won’t further improve until the fall.

The transit agency plans to bring back the rest of the trains after it installs and gets approval for six trackside monitoring stations that can automatically measure the wheels as they roll through. That is expected to happen later this summer.

Metro had known about the wheel issue since at least 2017 but treated it as a matter of warranty replacement of faulty wheels, rather than a serious safety hazard.

This story was updated with a more exact timeline from WMATA.