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| Metro to reopen with very limited service on 3 lines Monday | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| After two days of being shuttered for snow, Metro will reopen Monday -- but with very limited underground service on only three lines, officials said Sunday. | |
| The system will open at 7 a.m. with limited service on the Red, Orange and Green lines as follows: the Orange Line will run between Ballston and Eastern Market; the Red Line will run between Medical Center and Union Station; and the Green Line will run between Fort Totten and Anacostia. | |
| Trains will run every 20 to 25 minutes, the agency said. Fares will not be charged. | Trains will run every 20 to 25 minutes, the agency said. Fares will not be charged. |
| Buses will run on what Metro is calling “lifeline service” on 22 lines only, from noon to 5 p.m., every half hour. | |
| “This is unlike anything many of us have seen in our lifetimes,” Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said of the blizzard impact on Metro. “It’s going to take days to fully recover.” | |
| [Live updates as the region digs out from the blizzard] | |
| Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld said that if the subway had not shut down Friday night for the weekend, and instead had kept underground service operating, work crews would have severely limited in their weekend snow-removal efforts, meaning they would be “days” behind where they are now. | |
| “I’m definitely satisfied because, again, I think this was a logical approach, in terms of not putting our customers are risk over the weekend, and then beginning to rebuild the service. ... It’s huge what we are up against. And just to get to the point where we’re able to provide limited service on bus and rail, I think, is very good.” | |
| The Monday service plan leaves thousands of riders, particularly in Virginia, out of luck. | |
| Headways, meaning the time between trains — which can be as short as three minutes in some places during rush hours — will be 25 minutes at the start of the day. | |
| “We’ll try to ramp that up as the day goes along,” Stessel said. “Maybe as the day unfolds, we’ll try to get it to 15 minutes. But that will depend on a number of factors.” | |
| In making the extraordinary decision Thursday, a day before the storm arrived, to shut down Metro subway and bus service for the weekend, Wiedefeld cited safety as the paramount reason. He said roads and train tracks would almost certainly be impassable, or at least dangerous to travel on, during the snowfall, which, at the time, had been predicted to possibly last well into Sunday. | |
| The other big advantage to shutting down the subway, Wiedefeld said, was that snow-removal crews would have uninterrupted access to Metro’s outdoor rails, totaling 60-plus route-miles, or about 130 miles of tracks running in two directions. At the same time, officials said, about 900 of Metro’s approximately 1,135 rail cars could be sheltered in the idle tunnels and would not have to dug out from heavy snow after the blizzard. | |
| In order to make room for snow-clearing equipment and other apparatus to move through the tunnels, however, only 356 rail cars were sheltered, Stessel said. Work crews in rail yards have been laboring to dig out hundreds of other cars that were exposed to the elements, mostly in Metro’s rail yards. | |
| “Just to be clear, if anyone thinks Metro just took the weekend off, that’s not the case,” Stessel said. “The system is closed to passengers. There have been hundreds and hundreds of employees and contractors working in the most extreme conditions on 12-hours shifts around the clock just to get us where we are now.” | |
| In removing snow, one major focus are parts of the rail system known as “interlockings.” These are groups of rail switches located at outdoor points where rail lines divide or converge. There are three big interlockings: near the Stadium-Armory station, involving the Orange, Blue and Silver lines; near the East Falls Church station, involving the Orange and Silver; and near the King Street-Old Town station, involving the Blue and Yellow lines. | |
| The outdoor groups of switches at those locations are almost constantly in operation, as trains pass by every few minutes, headed in different directions, Stessel said There are scores of other switches all along the rail system that are used less frequently — for example, when a train needs to be moved from one track to a parallel track to avoid an unexpected obstacle. | |
| [What schools will be closed on Monday] | |
| Although the switches are equipped with heaters, “they’re really not designed for two feet of snow,” Stessel said. Not only do workers with tools have to remove the snow and ice, he said, they have to clear a wide area, to prevent snow from blowing back onto the switches. | |
| Stessel said Metro expects to announce its plan for Monday before D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser holds her 5 p.m. news briefing Sunday. He said Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld will attend the briefing and explain Metro’s status. |