Stadium-Armory is the last Metro station before the Orange line diverges from the Blue and Silver lines for trains going east. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
A track problem and a small fire near Metro’s Stadium-Armory station early Monday snarled the morning commute for riders on Metro’s Silver, Orange and Blue lines and delays continued until midday, officials said.
The evening commute started rough, too, when an unrelated fire broke out near the same spot late Monday afternoon.
The trouble began about 4 a.m., an hour before the subway opened, and involved a group of rail switches called an “interlocking,” just east of Stadium-Armory, Metro said. The transit agency said the problem was caused by a partial power shutdown, resulting from failed track work, and it lasted from early morning until early afternoon.
The trouble was cleared up shortly before 2 p.m., the transit agency said, after thousands of subway riders had been inconvenienced, with significant train delays caused by single-tracking between Stadium Armory and the two other stations, Cheverly on the Orange Line and Addison Road on the Blue and Silver lines.
Then, shortly before 5 p.m., another small fire broke out nearby, on tracks just outside the Benning Road station on the Blue and Silver lines. Although this fire was unrelated to the previous trouble, Metro said, it resulted in about an hour of single-tracking, ending shortly before 6 p.m. The cause of the second fire, quickly extinguished, was not immediately clear.
[Metro plans year-long subway maintenance blitz.]
The foul-up, at the start of the workweek, came after Metro on Friday announced that a year-long maintenance blitz, dubbed “SafeTrack,” would begin in June, causing partial shutdowns of some rail lines for days at a time and a slowdown in train traffic throughout the project, affecting virtually everyone who uses the system.
“Is today #wmata practice for #safetracks?” one rider tweeted at 5:43 a.m. Monday, about a half-hour after the subway opened.
“If so its going to be a really long year (or 3).”
Metro crews had been working over the weekend on a track problem near the Stadium-Armory interlocking and apparently thought the job was complete, the transit agency said. But when a test train was operated in the work area about 4 a.m., a problem occurred, Metro said, without specifying the nature of the trouble.
A D.C. fire department spokesman, Doug Buchanan, said the department received a report of an electrical fire at the work site about 4 a.m. He said that when firefighters arrived, Metro told them that a “small fire” on the tracks had been extinguished.
[Metro at age 40: A mess of its own making.]
“Obviously, the test run was unsuccessful,” Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said in an email. The Federal Transit Administration sent an inspector to the site, FTA spokesman Steven Kulm said. He said the FTA, which assumed safety oversight responsibility for Metro last year, is investigating the incident.
“The preliminary cause of this morning’s disruption on the Blue, Orange and Silver lines appears to be the test train making undesired contact with third-rail infrastructure that was being worked on by contractors over the weekend,” Stessel said Monday. “This, in turn, caused the test train to become disabled on the aerial structure. . . . The investigation now turns to the contractor’s quality control processes and the supervisors responsible for ensuring that the track is ready for train movement.”
On Saturday, the FTA cited Metro’s botched response to a fire Thursday at the Federal Center SW station, issuing a series of emergency directives to the transit agency and threatening to shut down all or parts of the nation’s second-busiest subway unless it took “urgent action” to ensure passenger safety.
[Federal agency orders new safety steps after Metro’s handling of Thursday fire]
Before the arrival of Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld in late November, Metro for decades had neglected maintenance, causing subway infrastructure to degrade. Track fires, often sparked by faulty power lines and other electrical equipment, have become a chronic problem.
Much of the neglect, under previous generations of Metro leadership, resulted from public pressure to keep the subway operating at full capacity, for economic and convenience reasons, and from a push for Metro expansion by the transit agency’s board and political leaders in the Washington area.
[Federal official issue new safety directives for Metro.]
When Monday’s 4 a.m. test failed, Stessel said, Metro partially shut down rail power in the problem area, leaving the test train stuck in place. About noon, after eight more hours of work, the power was briefly turned back on, so the train could be moved, Metro said. Then the power was turned off again while the track work continued.
Said one angry rider on Twitter, “okay so what on earth happened to this disabled test train that is still there. . . derailment? fire? some third thing?” This was at 8:29 a.m., more than four hours after the power had been cut.
“Hey @wmata,” another rider tweeted, “you should be ashamed of this.”
The problem occurred where the eastbound Orange Line diverges from the Blue and Silver lines, a short distance east of Stadium-Armory.
West of Stadium-Armory, the three lines share tracks below ground. Just beyond the station, as the tracks surface, the interlocking directs Orange Line trains toward New Carrollton and Blue and Silver trains toward Largo Town Center.
Throughout the morning and early afternoon, during the partial power shutdown, trains headed inbound and outbound had to share one track in the area, causing train delays of at least 15 minutes, Metro said. The single-tracking ceased shortly before 2 p.m.