Washington DC Metro discussion

[MARC Rider]

WMATA

Metro news and service information for the Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia region.

www.wmata.com

To complete this work as safely and efficiently as possible, both tracks must be taken out of service. Crews will address structural issues in the tunnels which are nearly 50 years old and date back to the original stations. The work will involve building supports to repair a concrete beam overhead. Crews will need to remove the concrete and pour approximately 1,000 square feet of concrete for the new beam, reinforced with additional rebar.

Customers will continue to have normal or near-normal service outside the work zones, with Red Line service every eight minutes from Shady Grove to Dupont Circle and Union Station to Glenmont.

Basically it's between Judiciary Square and Farragut North and includes shutting down Gallery Place and Metro Center, the two stations that connect the Red Line with the rest of the system. The reasoning is that the period over the holidays has the lowest ridership of the year, and that they can do the work in two weeks rather than the three months it would take if they only shut down over the weekend.

 

[Bob Dylan]

WMATA

Metro news and service information for the Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia region.

www.wmata.com

Basically it's between Judiciary Square and Farragut North and includes shutting down Gallery Place and Metro Center, the two stations that connect the Red Line with the rest of the system. The reasoning is that the period over the holidays has the lowest ridership of the year, and that they can do the work in two weeks rather than the three months it would take if they only shut down over the weekend.

WOW, Metro Center, the Nerve Center of Metro! I used to change Trains there Daily when in DC!

 

[BCL]

For a while I was thinking LA's Metro system since they also have a Red Line.

 

[joelkfla]

Union Station will be severed from Metro during that period, with trains running to the northern suburbs but nowhere else.

 

[MARC Rider]

WOW, Metro Center, the Nerve Center of Metro! I used to change Trains there Daily when in DC!

Yeah, when I was working at the Federal Triangle, that's where I got off and boarded, unless the weather was bad, then I'd go down to the Orange/Blue and ride the one stop to Federal Triangle. Usually, I just walked down the hill on 12th or 13th St. I'm sure glad I'm not working any more, though it's only for 2 weeks during the holidays, and if I really needed to get somewhere, I'd just take the D6 or Circulator bus, which is what I did when the office was at 13th and L st.

 

[George Harris]

For a while I was thinking LA's Metro system since they also have a Red Line.

Saw these trains and an LA station used in a movie quite a few years ago with WMATA labels on them so they could pretend they were in DC for the sake of the movie plot. Screamed phony to anyone who had ever seen any part of the WMATA system.

 

[George Harris]

The list, copied in for convenience:

• Replacing the severely deteriorated concrete ceiling of a box fan shaft above both tracks between Farragut North and Dupont Circle.
• Replacing a switch machine near Judiciary Sq that has reached the end of its usable life. Work on this machine has been deferred in the past. Switch machines allow trains to switch from one track to another and reroute around incidents that may lead to customer delays.
• Installing nearly 40,000 linear feet of fiber-optic cables. The upgrade to fiber-optic cables along the Red Line will provide a foundation for advanced communications-based train control (CTBC) technology to improve service reliability and efficiency.
• Replacing grout pads and leak repairs between Dupont Circle and Gallery Place.
• Installing new platform edge lighting at all stations between Farragut North and Judiciary Sq.
• Replacing rail fasteners and repairing rail joints.
• Adding extra third rail insulation for added safety during winter conditions.

Does this ever make me feel old. This is part of the first section of WMATA built, the track was contract TW-1. I was there fresh out of service working as an engineering peon for the track contractor when this thing was originally built. There is no way properly mixed and placed concrete should be showing any form of failure in this sort of service after 50 years, or even much longer. Likewise, there were considerable issues with the grout pads under the fasteners, such that fasteners on thin grout pads on the structural invert concrete are not usually used in other systems. Replacing a switch machine should be relatively quick and easy. Don't know why they even bothered to put in on the list. Leak repairs and grout pads in the same sentence makes not sense. There is no relationship between the two, unless structural leakage has caused separation of the pad from the structure. Quite a few of the rail fasteners suffered from "infant mortality", that is failures when near new. Have no idea whether the fasteners in question are the originals or the next generation installed. I don't recall now whether the insulated rail joints in this track contract were bonded joints or the improved insulated joint that were essentially an intermediate step between the old multipieces of insulation joints and the glued joints. I do know for certain that TW-2 and following track contracts had glued insulated joints. Either way, WMATA was one of the earliest users of bonded insulated joints, likewise of continuous welded rail over multi-span aerial structures. Have no clue what the third rail insulation issue is. Fortunately, by now anyone that could be blamed for any of these things that could be considered design or construction deficiencies is by now either deceased or long since retired.

 

[AmtrakMaineiac]

There is no way properly mixed and placed concrete should be showing any form of failure in this sort of service after 50 years, or even much longer.

Consider that the Pantheon in Rome, built of unreinforced concrete by the Roman Emperor Hadrian in the 2nd Century is still standing.

 

[cirdan]

Consider that the Pantheon in Rome, built of unreinforced concrete by the Roman Emperor Hadrian in the 2nd Century is still standing.

I know of lots of concrete bridges and underpasses that are less than 50 years old showing significant signs of chemical degradation such as formation of stalactites that suggest rain water is penetrating the concrete and washing it out, creating cavities (the stalactite material must be coming from somewhere).

This is made worse in underground structures where the water may not be actual rainwater but may be significantly more acidic due to the soil it passed through, as well as the inward pressure, for example when a trench or tunnel is positioned below the water table.

There has also been water ingress in the Pantheon by the way and the concrete has been patched and repaired in places over the years with varying degrees of professionalism. The building only survived because it was used as a church. There are plenty of examples in Rome of ancient buildings that were not maintained because nobody had a use for them. There is typically little more left than a few crumbling bits of wall and a column of two.

 

[MARC Rider]

I know of lots of concrete bridges and underpasses that are less than 50 years old showing significant signs of chemical degradation such as formation of stalactites that suggest rain water is penetrating the concrete and washing it out, creating cavities (the stalactite material must be coming from somewhere).

This is made worse in underground structures where the water may not be actual rainwater but may be significantly more acidic due to the soil it passed through, as well as the inward pressure, for example when a trench or tunnel is positioned below the water table.

There has also been water ingress in the Pantheon by the way and the concrete has been patched and repaired in places over the years with varying degrees of professionalism. The building only survived because it was used as a church. There are plenty of examples in Rome of ancient buildings that were not maintained because nobody had a use for them. There is typically little more left than a few crumbling bits of wall and a column of two.

When I worked for USGS back in the late 1990s, our office had a project with WMATA to study ground-water leakage into Metro stations north of Dupont Circle. I think the major problem was at the Medical Center station in Bethesda.

Hydrogeologic controls on ground-water discharge to the Washington METRO subway tunnel near the Medical Center station and Crossover, Montgomery County, Maryland | U.S. Geological Survey

Excessive water intrusion has been observed inside several of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority subway tunnels, with the worst leakage occurring along the Red Line tunnels and stations north of Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. These tunnels were constructed in bedrock that...

www.usgs.gov

https://pubs.usgs.gov/wri/wri034294/wri03-4294.pdf

 

[BCL]

Saw these trains and an LA station used in a movie quite a few years ago with WMATA labels on them so they could pretend they were in DC for the sake of the movie plot. Screamed phony to anyone who had ever seen any part of the WMATA system.

I heard the Amazon Prime series Jack Ryan used a subway in the Montreal area.

The LA Metro was used for scenes in Lethal Weapon 3 before it had even opened.

 

[Metra Electric Rider]

Question for you WMATA experts; I know that Harry Weese (Stan Allen was the PM - he became friendly with my parents in retirement - they were neighbors here in Chicago- great guy) did the architectural design, but who did the tunnels and technical (aka structural & civil engineering) portions of the design? Obviously Weese, both the man and the firm, is long gone.

 

[slasher-fun]

I heard the Amazon Prime series Jack Ryan used a subway in the Montreal area.

De la Concorde, in Laval (north of Montréal), on the Orange line

 

[trainman74]

For a while I was thinking LA's Metro system since they also have a Red Line.

It's not officially called that anymore, though -- it's now the B Line. (Metro can't control what people call it in practice, though, and it is still denoted by a red line on maps.)

 

[John Santos]

Saw these trains and an LA station used in a movie quite a few years ago with WMATA labels on them so they could pretend they were in DC for the sake of the movie plot. Screamed phony to anyone who had ever seen any part of the WMATA system.

Was that the infamous Die Hard 2, where the pay phones at Dulles had the orange/red asterisk Pacific Bell "flaming a**h***" logo?

 

[George Harris]

Question for you WMATA experts; I know that Harry Weese (Stan Allen was the PM - he became friendly with my parents in retirement - they were neighbors here in Chicago- great guy) did the architectural design, but who did the tunnels and technical (aka structural & civil engineering) portions of the design? Obviously Weese, both the man and the firm, is long gone.

For those that had to work with him on the engineering side, "great guy" so far as things professional were concerned was not in our vocabulary.

Harry Weese was the General Architectual Consultant which meant they developed all appearance related concepts and related general design standards. The appearance of the station vaults was their concept, as was the use of clay tiles for the platform surfaces, size and shape of granite platform edges, concepts of mezzanines, station entrances, etc. A very specific part of the station design was to have a sense of openness, particularly avoiding the forest of columns so common in New York and elsewhere. There were however, numerous areas where his solely appearance related obsession conflicted with good engineering and in some cases ease of people movement.

The General Engineering Consultant was DeLeuw Cather and Associates, again a company that no longer exists. They were bought by Parsons Engineering, a construction company quite a few years after I left them, and I do not know what has happened since. As General Engineering Consultant they wrote standards for everything engineering related, such as alignment standards, clearances, ventilation concepts and material standards for such things as concrete, steel, etc. This included interfaces with essentially everything such as the city utilities, roads and streets, and everyone else that had anything built anywhere near a WMATA line. Sometimes this involved proximity to and protection of facilities that did not exist in so far as the public was concerned. They also did the detailed engineering, drawings and specifications for track (I was part of that) and electrification.

There was also the General Construction Consultant, which was Bechtel, which oversaw the construction contractors and construction related issues and interfaces.

The vehicles themselves were in another world, and at times seemed to be in another solar system.

 

[bonzoesc]

Was that the infamous Die Hard 2, where the pay phones at Dulles had the orange/red asterisk Pacific Bell "flaming a**h***" logo?

I don't think there were any metro scenes in Die Hard 2, since it's supposed to be Dulles, which didn't have any metro service until 2022. Denver Stapleton stood in for it.

 

[Trollopian]

For those that had to work with him on the engineering side, "great guy" so far as things professional were concerned was not in our vocabulary.

Harry Weese was the General Architectual Consultant which meant they developed all appearance related concepts and related general design standards. The appearance of the station vaults was their concept, as was the use of clay tiles for the platform surfaces, size and shape of granite platform edges, concepts of mezzanines, station entrances, etc....

And let's not forget to "credit" (cough cough) a little-known federal agency, the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, with near-veto power over the appearance of monumental Washington. Reportedly the soaring, waffled ceilings were at their insistence. From History of the Commission of Fine Arts | Commission of Fine Arts: "Large-scale development returned to Washington in the mid-1950s through the 1960s, with the development of International- and Modern-style complexes such as the Federal Center Southwest and the Kennedy Center; other civic improvements included the monumental Metro system, whose coffered station vaults recalled Imperial Roman construction." Alleged original sketch at A Century Of Design: The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, 1910-2010 | National Building Museum.

The design (which I frankly find dystopian) has had many other impacts on Metro. It necessitated very, very deep stations, even deeper than the hilly topography in parts of DC like Rock Creek Park demanded. That in turn required long escalators and elevators which are prone to breakdown. The gloomy stations are difficult to illuminate and to clean, and they leak. Form over function.

I've heard that the CFA and other designers wanted to set Metro apart from older systems like New York and London with their lower ceilings and scrubbable and durable tile. Of course, the reviled "subway tile" is a classic that came (deservedly) roaring back to popularity, at least for homes, in the 21st century.

 

[John Bredin]

Saw these trains and an LA station used in a movie quite a few years ago with WMATA labels on them so they could pretend they were in DC for the sake of the movie plot. Screamed phony to anyone who had ever seen any part of the WMATA system.

Minority Report?

 

[JamesWhitcombRiley]

The Washington Metro station design is popular, the coffered underground stations. I'm all for funding operations over stations, but my impression is tourists flock to the Metro and avoid the NYC subway. The new lighting was surprisingly dim though, when I rode after a long absence. It's not just the platform experience it affects, but the wayfinding getting there as well. Is it dimmer?

 

[AmtrakBlue]

The Washington Metro station design is popular, the coffered underground stations. I'm all for funding operations over stations, but my impression is tourists flock to the Metro and avoid the NYC subway. The new lighting was surprisingly dim though, when I rode after a long absence. It's not just the platform experience it affects, but the wayfinding getting there as well. Is it dimmer?

I don’t ride the metro often but did use it last week and I don’t recall the lights being dimmer.

 

[bonzoesc]

The Washington Metro station design is popular, the coffered underground stations. I'm all for funding operations over stations, but my impression is tourists flock to the Metro and avoid the NYC subway. The new lighting was surprisingly dim though, when I rode after a long absence. It's not just the platform experience it affects, but the wayfinding getting there as well. Is it dimmer?

I don't feel like the lightning in the underground platforms has changed at all in the 15y since I started going to DC every year or so. It's always been dim, but dramatic instead of dingy.



I really feel sorry for tourists avoiding the NY subways too, I'd hate to see how much time and money they spend on other modes.

 

[MARC Rider]

Back in the 1960s when they were designing the Metro, many of the subways station on existing lines (my experience was mostly limited to Philadelphia and New York) were still lit with incandescent bulbs, which, together with the forest of support columns, made the stations seem like gloomy dungeons. Plus, there was a sense of dread, as crime was spiking during this period. Thus, the first time I entered a Metro Station, around 1977 or so, I was pretty impressed with the open plan and thought the lighting was fine. I rode Metro a good bit during the 1980s when I was going to grad school part time and always felt the system was new and well designed. I didn't start riding it regularly until the mid-2010s, and sometime between 2000 and 2010, the service started going downhill (mostly mechanical reliability issues involving the train doors and the escalators) and the stations started looking shabby and gloomy. I wonder if they cut back the lighting a bit to save electricity. I do agree that unfinished concrete, popular during the heyday of brutalist architecture, does not age gracefully. The old 100+ year old tiled subways stations in New York and Philly look a lot better once they installed brighter lighting. But I do prefer the barrel vaults over the forest of columns. And one problem with a lot of the Metro stations built after the original section was opened is that there is only one exit out of the station.

 

[JamesWhitcombRiley]

Maybe the dimness in the Metro was in my eyes - one transfer station in Virginia had both me and some tourists I met a little disoriented, and that lone side platform under the others seemed to be in the shadows. So chalk it up to anecdote.

A few years ago the coffered ceiling was painted, and then the complaints came in, and they changed the color back to one more like the original, if I have that story right.

There are excellent photos of how the reflections from the coffer squares line up with the platforms.

The almost-standard gauge of the tracks has proved to be an annoyance in operation and procurement, to say the least. I guess we still don't know why the wheels were not snug on the axles on the latest cars - something at Kawasaki in Japan, or at the subcontractor in the U.S. As for the other organizational problems, perhaps politicians are getting the message they can score points by improving management, such as not allowing fake inspections. At the Boston MBTA hopefully. In NY state and city, it's on the agenda to claim credit for on-time, on-budget and the like. It's possibly a real trend. Helps to have a critical mass of journalists fighting for the stories, and a few trailblazing academics. Really a different world from the era of building MARTA, BART and WMATA! The Washington Post has been publishing a lot of rail stories by Luz Lazo the last few weeks, but it's closer to a one-paper town compared to NY, though with laudable independent web sites as well.

 

[Trollopian]

Maybe the dimness in the Metro was in my eyes - one transfer station in Virginia had both me and some tourists I met a little disoriented, and that lone side platform under the others seemed to be in the shadows. So chalk it up to anecdote.

A few years ago the coffered ceiling was painted, and then the complaints came in, and they changed the color back to one more like the original, if I have that story right....

You're correct. There was an outcry from architects and preservationists in 2017 when Metro started painting Union Station, the transit system's busiest, white. (Note that this is the Metro station, not the train station of the same name.) According to this Washington Post article, Metro stated that the original brutalist concrete had become so dirty and dingy over the decades that even power-washing wouldn't budge the grime; furthermore, riders said it made them feel safer. As a regular rider for decades I can attest that most stations were, in many spots, too dim to read a book or magazine. (Remember books and magazines? Before we all had smartphones?) The areas under the mezzanines and beneath the escalators' bulk especially were notoriously shadowy. Metro had in fact painted or "sealed" a few other stations over the years but in a softer grey: Save Brutalism Inside The Washington, D.C. Metro | National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Operationally I might think it's lower-maintenance to use lighter and even reflective surfaces (hence the iconic "subway tile") to bounce around the available light, rather than pay pricy labor to constantly replace light bulbs, especially on ceilings as high as Metro's, but what do I know.