By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 5, 2005

Metro trains have traveled farther between breakdowns and caused fewer delays in recent months, Metro officials said yesterday.

Delays, which Metro defines as service disruptions lasting four minutes or longer, dropped from an average of nine each weekday in December to six each weekday in April. The figures include delays caused by train breakdowns, sick passengers and police activities.

Another measure of improvement is the distance traveled by a train before it suffers a breakdown that causes a delay. In December, rail cars traveled a mean distance of 37,430 miles before a delay; by April that figure climbed to 53,213 miles, Metro officials said.

Steven A. Feil, Metro's chief operating officer for rail, said more reliable subway service is driven by three factors: improvements to the track, better management techniques and corrections to problems with some rail cars.

Maintenance crews have been replacing old track switches and stretches of worn rail while smoothing the surface of the rest of the railroad. That has reduced the number of signal problems that delay trains, Feil said.

Metro managers have also been trying to minimize disruptions by making better choices when mechanical problems arise.

Last year, if a train had a door problem on one of its rail cars, all passengers would have been ordered to get off and the train would have been sent to the rail yard for repairs. Now, Metro directs the train operator to close down just the affected rail car and keep the rest of the train in service, eliminating a delay for most of the passengers.

These techniques were suggested to Metro in January by an outside panel of subway experts, who found that Metro was often unnecessarily taking trains out of service and delaying its passengers.

"We looked at some of the operational procedures and what we could do," Feil said. "You don't have to go and offload every train that has a problem."

And the agency is getting improved performance from its rail fleet, especially the newest and most troublesome cars, which were manufactured by CAF Inc. of Spain and began service in 2001.

For the first time, the four-year-old CAF cars, which have the distinctive red, white and blue interiors, met and exceeded their goal in March of traveling a mean distance of 72,600 miles before a breakdown, Feil said. The cars were supposed to have reached that reliability level years ago but have been hobbled by problems with their doors, propulsion and onboard computers. Feil said engineering improvements to the rail cars have made the difference.

Milder spring weather has helped the rail cars to run, Feil said.

An unprecedented number of riders have been boarding Metro trains. April, which marks the start of the Washington tourist season and usually is one of Metro's busiest months, set a record with a daily average of 717,282 passengers.

Riders took the trains to the National Cherry Blossom Festival and the debut of the Washington Nationals. The day with the highest ridership was April 14, the first Nationals game at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, when trains carried 766,184 passengers.