Metro: The End of the Line For Life's Lost Accessories

Three straw hats, extra large. A purple Revlon hair dryer. A Spider-Man lunchbox. And this: a small rectangular box wrapped in shiny red paper and adorned with a tiny plush red star. With it, an unsigned Snoopy birthday card. Found Aug. 6 on a Red Line train.

A look inside the bins of Metro's Lost and Found office tells a lot about life in the Washington region and the hundreds of thousands of people who ride Metrorail and Metrobus, with more than 1.2 million trips on an average weekday.

What people lose shows that they're doing a lot more than just slogging to work.

"It's incredible the amount of things that folks leave. You name it, it'll come in," said Lendy Castillo, head of Metro's customer relations office, which includes lost and found.

Dentures, yes. Strollers, yes. A croquet set in a battered blue plastic case.

For years, a story has circulated that someone once left a kitchen sink on a train.

"I haven't heard that one," Castillo said.

The stories about prosthetic limbs being found also are urban legends. But the department has seen just about everything else.

Each month, 3,000 to 4,000 items found throughout the system are tagged and logged into a database (except keys and eyeglasses, which are too numerous to count). The items are stored in a nondescript room on the fifth floor of a Silver Spring office building, in green plastic bins and gray drawers labeled with the date they were turned in.

The most commonly lost items are keys and glasses. The tally for August: about 1,500 sets of keys, 500 pairs of glasses. Plus 612 cellphones.

Three employees handle lost-and-found claims. They answer the phones, log detailed descriptions of items turned in and tag them for storage. The more detailed the description, the greater the chance owner and item will be reunited.

"If you lost an envelope with brown and white on it, I can look at all the descriptions with the word 'envelope' in it," explained Kimberly Taylor, who has worked in the office for seven years.