Weekend Track Work Is Expected to Disrupt Trips to National Airport

Travelers planning to take Metrorail to Reagan National Airport for a Labor Day weekend getaway take note: Add 30 minutes to your travel time because major track work on the Blue and Yellow lines will shut down service to the airport from Alexandria and points south on those lines.

Metro is replacing the track and other infrastructure between the National Airport Metro station and the Braddock Road station. The stations will remain open, but the track between them will be closed because of the work, officials said.

The shutdown will begin at 9 p.m. Friday and is scheduled to continue until 4 a.m. Tuesday.

Metro will run free shuttle buses every five minutes between the airport and Braddock Road stations to move riders through the affected area.

Labor Day weekend is one of the busiest travel weekends of the year, and Metro officials apologized for inconveniencing riders. But they say the three-day shutdown will enable them to complete the work quickly and will be less frustrating for passengers than the alternative: doing the overhaul in stages over a longer period. It would take about 2 1/2 months of late-night single-tracking five days a week to do the same amount of work, officials estimate.

The work includes replacing 3,200 feet of track, more than 1,000 crossties, which hold the rails in place, and 300 tons of stone ballast, which holds the entire track in place. The crossties have not been replaced since the late 1970s, when this section of Metro opened, according to Wes Albright, superintendent of track production

Normally, Metro uses a machine that replaces crossties by sliding the old ones out from under the track and inserting new ones. But the section of track being overhauled this weekend doesn't have enough clearance. Some walls are very close to the track, and each crosstie is 8 feet 6 inches long (and weighs 250 pounds).

So track crews have to use a much more labor- and time-intensive method. Workers will take out the old track, in 20-foot sections, and push the stone ballast to either side before laying out new crossties and rails, Albright said. Just removing the old track will take from about midnight Friday until 2 p.m. Saturday.

"We hate to inconvenience our customers, but we're at the end of the life cycle on these ties and a lot of our equipment, and we're left with no choice but to schedule these shutdowns," he said.