Commuters wait for their train at the L'Enfant Metro Station in this August file photo. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)
Rush-hour commuters on Metro’s Orange and Silver lines will see fewer trains and will experience more stop-and-go rides for at least six months because of massive fire damage to a subway power station, the agency said Friday.
In yet another bad-news announcement for patrons of Washington’s trouble-prone transit system, Metro said that Monday’s fire, in a power facility near the Stadium-Armory station, was so severe that all of the facility’s most critical electrical equipment was destroyed, greatly reducing the power available for trains in that area.
Under revised subway schedules — which took effect Friday and will last for six months or more while the power station is rebuilt — rush-hour passengers on the Orange and Silver lines will bear the brunt of the inconvenience, Metro said.
The number of rush-hour Orange and Silver trains combined, normally 20 per hour, dropped to 15 per hour as of Friday. In addition, until well into next year, Metro said, trains on those two lines, as well as on the Blue Line, probably will be forced to “hold” at station platforms more often and for longer than usual.
While rush-hour rides on the Blue Line are likely to be more sluggish, Metro said, the already low number of trains on that line, just five per hour, will not be cut back.
Metro’s deputy general manager, Rob Troup, said the fire apparently was caused by an electrical malfunction. He warned that the reduced schedules could get worse as Metro further analyzes the power problem, which he called “a very fluid situation.”
“We may have to go to something longer” than the current slowdown, he said. “But right now, we’re looking at that as an absolutely last option.”
For daily riders of the three lines, including thousands of workers headed to Washington from Northern Virginia and Prince George’s County, Metro offered this advice for coping with disrupted commuting schedules: “Plan accordingly.”
“We’ll try to keep communicating to our customers what the reality of their trips might be as we go along,” interim general manager Jack Requa said.
With limited subway electricity available in the vicinity of the Stadium-Armory station, trains on the Orange, Silver and Blue lines have to operate at lower speeds in that area, Metro said. And when leaving that station, the trains have to accelerate slowly, meaning it takes longer for them to reach their maximum allowed speeds.
Metro said that if it did not reduce the number of trains on the three lines, the slow flow though the Stadium-Armory bottleneck would create massive backups. Yet even with fewer trains, the bottleneck is certain to cause sluggish traffic.
“If we lose just a couple of seconds,” Troup said, “the chain reaction can have a significant impact downstream. So we’re trying to deal with that as best we can.”
[Besides Metro’s power station fire, riders were trapped in a tunnel.]
On the Orange and Silver lines, which share tracks along an 18-station stretch of the subway between East Falls Church and Stadium-Armory, trains normally run at six-minute intervals on each line during the morning and evening peak travel hours (weekdays from about 5 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.).
That translates to one Orange or Silver train rolling into a station every three minutes, in the rare hours when the system works perfectly.
The Blue Line shares tracks with the Orange and Silver lines along a 13-station stretch from Rosslyn to Stadium-Armory, across the downtown Washington core. Metro said Blue trains will continue running at 12-minute rush-hour intervals.
As a result, through a huge part of the subway where the three lines share tracks, a total of 20 rush-hour Orange, Silver and Blue trains will operate every hour, down from the normal 25, transit officials said. Because most trains are six cars long, that would mean about 30 fewer cars per hour on those lines during peak travel periods.
To help ease the expected crowding on platforms, Metro said, it plans to run more eight-car trains than usual on the three lines during rush hours.
Train intervals on the Orange, Silver and Blue lines are still 12 minutes, as usual, during the midday hours and after the late-day commuter rush, and the normal 15 to 20 minutes during the late-night hours, Metro said.