Riding the rails

The Metrorail system in the DC area is undergoing a year’s worth of repairs to its infrastructure, which they call SafeTrack. (On account of they’re hoping to get the tracks in good enough condition that they stop setting trains on fire and killing passengers.) This involves periodic cutting or choking of services along different lines, which they are unaccountably referring to as “surge” times. And no matter where, exactly, the break or single-tracking actually occurs, there’s a knock-on effect throughout the system.

The past two weeks there was no service between Eastern Market and Minnesota Avenue in the District, a stretch of track shared by three lines, Orange, Silver and Blue. Metro management therefore decided that they would only run Blue Line trains between Alexandria and Arlington National Cemetery, not into the District. That meant that the only rail option for residents of Alexandria and South Arlington was the Yellow Line. And Metro increased neither the number of trains they ran nor the number of cars per train, because: Metro.

(It also meant that if you wanted to get to Arlington National Cemetery, normally accomplished fairly easily on the BL, you had a rather convoluted journey. Unless you were coming from Alexandria or South Arlington, whatever line you started on you had to transfer to a YL train, get off at Pentagon, then get on a BL train and go one stop more.)

The surge this week involves complete closure of YL and BL service between Braddock Road in Alexandria and National Airport. (And next week they’ll shut down the lines between National Airport and Pentagon City.) Metro purports to have free shuttle buses taking passengers across that gap, but let me just suggest the image to you of a Chinese fire drill.

Once again, they are not running trains more frequently; they’ve just begged people to find alternatives to riding Metro. And the commute home yesterday was quite the slice. L’Enfant Plaza, the last transfer point in the District for Virginia-bound YL trains, looked a little like a war zone; apparently an earlier train had broken down, with the predictable knock-on chaos and sense of despair. This isn’t actual footage of the station, but it could be:

And you know it’s bad when your train driver gets on the PA system to tell the passengers, “Yes, things aren’t working as well as people thought they would. Yesterday I was driving a train that broke down, too.”