Metro Considers Pulling The Rug From Under Riders

During a washingtonpost.com online chat last month, a Yellow Line rider complained about carpet stains on the previous evening's commute. "It can't cost that much to CLEAN THE CARS," the rider wrote.

Actually, it costs about $6 million a year to clean the rail cars, plus $500,000 for equipment and supplies.

Crews remove trash and spot-clean at the end of the morning and evening rushes and when a train is taken out of service at day's end. The carpet in every rail car is vacuumed once a week, shampooed every two months (more often during a bad winter, when platforms are salted to de-ice them). Carpet is replaced every five years. Seats, windows, walls, poles and light fixtures are washed by hand every 60 days.

Metro's no-graffiti policy means defaced seats are removed immediately. The normal life span on cushions is "years and years," according to Eugene Garzone, who is in charge of rail-car maintenance.

This spring, Metro is working overtime replacing carpet. At the Shady Grove rail yard on a recent Saturday morning, six mechanics, working two shifts, ripped up the floor covering, removed seats and installed replacements on a pair of rail cars. The work has to be done in the middle of the night or on weekends, when the system isn't busy. The mechanics who fix the wheels and brakes also fit cushions and lay carpet.

Mechanics such as Simon Jules, 40, say they come across all sorts of stuff in the process. One time, he found skimpy red-and-white underwear wedged between two seats.

Fellow mechanic Lentre Arnold, 49, who has seen the orange cushions slashed by knives and scarred by graffiti, offered this explanation: The color, he said, brings out people's worst emotions. Riders "don't know how much has to be done on the rail cars, but I hope they appreciate it," Arnold said, wedging a new blue seat back snugly atop a matching bottom.

Mechanic Billy Gannom, 26, wearing a mask and gloves, pulled up ratty carpet amid clouds of dust. Another worker scraped glue from the floor and tightened loose floorboard screws before 70 square yards of new carpet ($48.95 a square yard) could be put down. Total cost per rail car: $3,700 for material, $1,500 for labor.

"We don't have carpet in New York," said Brian Gibson, 37, while sprawled on his stomach, slicing carpet edges with a box cutter. Running his fingers over the red, yellow, green and blue tweed known as Taiping Option, he added: "This is really, really nice."

The old carpet is chucked into dumpsters, but the cushions are trucked to the Lunenburg correctional facility in Lunenburg, Va., three hours away. At the low-medium security facility, nine inmates work full time refurbishing Metro seats. In assembly-line fashion, they strip off the dirty vinyl, steam the flattened foam to restore it to a three-inch thickness and glue new vinyl to a metal backing. Each cushion takes about 18 minutes. The line turns out about 200 cushions a day.

The orange and brown vinyl is being replaced with the newer color scheme Metro calls Potomac Blue, Colonial Burgundy and Chesapeake Sand.

Lunenberg has 1,250 inmates and operates several workshops. The Metro work pays the most -- 62 to 80 cents an hour -- and is year-round. And as Charlie Beach, who runs all the workshops, pointed out, gluing seats is "not as dusty as the sanding pit."