Problems on the Metro: WMATA Metrorail Trip Report 8/17 Fri

Last night I went with a friend to a Keith Urban concert at Verizon Center. Naturally, I took Metro to get there.

Upon arrival at Grosvenor-Strathmore, my home stop, I could tell there were problems on the Metro. I stayed perhaps five minutes or so to watch trains before getting on, since I was a little early and my friend hadn't arrived yet. During that span, four outbound trains passed one after another. At one point there were not one but two outbound trains sitting beyond the station waiting for the train in front to leave the station. Meanwhile, on the inbound track, ONE train passed. Two of the four outbound trains I saw prior to my friend's arrival terminated at Grosvenor. When my friend came and we descended down onto the platform, the PIMS sign said that the next Glenmont bound train was going to arrive in 9 minutes. Well, since two trains were still sitting in the pocket track, we were sure that we would get one of those in less than 9 minutes. Four minutes and two outbound trains later, still no train. Meanwhile, the latter outbound train was a Grosvenor-bound train, but since the pocket track was full, it couldn't move. My guess is that more outbound trains piled up behind that one. Another minute later, here comes the train from the pocket track. Now the terminating train can leave, and another outbound train pulls in right behind it. Well, the train that's supposed to be my train just sits there. Then it moves up...too far, as the front car overshoots the platform. My friend and I are thinking What the hell's goin' on? The train then heads downtown, without opening its doors. At this point there are two minutes left before the next Glenmont-bound train arrives. I expected the next inbound train to come from the pocket track as well, but this time go in service. Not so much. We waited the 2 remaining minutes before the train came. A nine minute wait for a train during rush hour = UNACCEPTABLE.

My friend and I breathed sighs of relief when this train's doors opened to let us on. The train was crowded to the point that it was SRO, but there was room to stand. This train was a 6-car Rohr train, and it was Glenmont bound. I was in Rohr #1144, the front car. The actual ride was pleasant and uneventful. I was quite surprised at the number of 3000 series Bredas I saw that were not yet rehabilitated. I had expected all 3000 series Bredas to be rehabbed by the time I got back from my "vacation", but yesterday proved that I was dead wrong. In fact, my train coming home contained an unrehabbed Breda 3000 series pair, but I'll get to that later. No Alstom car sightings yesterday, to my disappointment. I thought that there were a few Alstom pairs on the Red Line and was hoping to see one, but I had no such luck. I could be wrong about that; please tell me if I am.

The concert was AWESOME! Now don't get me wrong, I'm more into rap/hip hop and many forms of rock, but a little country every now and then delights me. Keith Urban isn't even pure country; he's sort of like a mixed breed between country and rock. His music style is very unique, that's for sure. And the crowd was the rowdiest crowd I've ever seen at a concert. My friend and I had a fabulous time. The opening group was the Wreckers, who are very attractive and talented but a little too country for me.

My friend got picked up at the Verizon Center and I hopped on the Metro back to Dupont Circle to meet my father at his office, who was working late and would drive me home. Well, I wasn't expecting the number of people that decided to ride the Metro after the concert. There was a long line to get on the escalators into the mezzanine, a long line to get through the turnstiles, and a long line to get onto the platform. The platform was absolutely packed. I know that there are many more seats at concerts than Wizards or Capitals games, but I've never seen half as many people riding the Metro after a sold-out Wizards game as last night. There were six minutes until the next Shady Grove bound train arrived, according to the PIMS, but by the time we got to the front end of the platform, where the least amount of people were, we only had to wait one minute before the train came.

My Shady Grove bound train arrived and it wasn't that crowded, to my surprise. This train was a mixed 6-car train of Breda Rehabs and original Bredas. The first two and last two cars were rehabilitated Bredas, and the middle two cars were original 3000 series Bredas. I was in Breda Rehab #3129, the front car. I couldn't believe how quickly we left the station! Just seconds after I boarded and settled into my seat next to the door, the C/R announced that there was an empty train directly behind this train. He must've done an incredible persuading job, because right after he said that he closed the doors and we were off. My car wasn't even close to full, as there were minimal standees. The short ride to Dupont Circle was uneventful, but we did make a brief unscheduled stop in the tunnel between Farragut North and Dupont Circle. No big deal.

Overall, I had an amazing time at the concert and if he ever comes into your city, but yourself a ticket and see him, even if country is not your favorite genre of music. It isn't my favorite, and I still had a great time.

Metro has train operators, not conductors. Also, the pocket at Grosvenor only has room for 8 cars, I don't understand why you think that two trains were on that track, unless they were both 4 car trains. Finally, in a delay, it is necessary for central control to get the trains back on schedule, and will frequently have trains skip stations in order to get back to normal service as quickly as possible. It is likely those trains were ordered by central to not serve Grosvenor.

No, all trains were 6 cars that day. I didn't see any 8 car trains. The first terminating train must've continued on to Shady Grove Yard, or perhaps Shady Grove to re-enter service there.

The ironic part about trains skipping stations to catch up to schedule is that the passengers waiting at the skipped stations are delayed even further.

Granted WMATA may operate to a higher standard than other transit authorities (I'll let others qualify that or not), but a nine minute delay, while annoying, isn't severe. What are the regular headways on the Red Line at rush hour? That's probably not more than 2-3 times (at most) the scheduled frequency.

While it's infuriating to have the long wait, only to have the first train(s), you have to remember that the delay you're experiencing is going to be hitting all the way to Glenmont. If all trains made all stops as they normally would, that first (and perhaps second, too) train would probably lose more and more time over the course of the run. I wouldn't be surprised if it lost 4 or 5 more minutes (less than a minute per station) by downtown, at which point it will be an outbound train, and start losing even more time on its outbound trip. By the time it got to, say, Fort Totten, that delay would probably be more like an 18-20 minute delay. Thus, they inconvenience the passengers where you are by a couple minutes to move all the trains back closer to where they're supposed to be. What you're seeing isn't an inconvenience, its good transit dispatching to recover from a disruption or delay.

Otherwise, you'd get what you see on our MBTA lines up here -- a parade of trains stuck in a logjam, all going in one direction one after another, while the opposite side sees a 20 minute hole in service.

That's the thing -- when they make that choice, the dispatchers aren't just thinking about what's going on at Grosvenor, they're thinking about six or seven moves down the line -- literally. Two minutes to run an empty train ahead might save 10 or 15 minutes by the time it reaches the other end of the line.

octr202 wrote:Granted WMATA may operate to a higher standard than other transit authorities (I'll let others qualify that or not), but a nine minute delay, while annoying, isn't severe. What are the regular headways on the Red Line at rush hour? That's probably not more than 2-3 times (at most) the scheduled frequency.

While it's infuriating to have the long wait, only to have the first train(s), you have to remember that the delay you're experiencing is going to be hitting all the way to Glenmont. If all trains made all stops as they normally would, that first (and perhaps second, too) train would probably lose more and more time over the course of the run. I wouldn't be surprised if it lost 4 or 5 more minutes (less than a minute per station) by downtown, at which point it will be an outbound train, and start losing even more time on its outbound trip. By the time it got to, say, Fort Totten, that delay would probably be more like an 18-20 minute delay. Thus, they inconvenience the passengers where you are by a couple minutes to move all the trains back closer to where they're supposed to be. What you're seeing isn't an inconvenience, its good transit dispatching to recover from a disruption or delay.

Otherwise, you'd get what you see on our MBTA lines up here -- a parade of trains stuck in a logjam, all going in one direction one after another, while the opposite side sees a 20 minute hole in service.

That's the thing -- when they make that choice, the dispatchers aren't just thinking about what's going on at Grosvenor, they're thinking about six or seven moves down the line -- literally. Two minutes to run an empty train ahead might save 10 or 15 minutes by the time it reaches the other end of the line.

Nine minutes isn't abslutely horrible. I have to take PATH on occaison and it's a standard six minute headway during rush-hour. And remember that's in NY-NJ; the train fills up in about a minute.

Is that a joke? 9 minutes for a WMATA Metrorail train during rush hour is absolutely unacceptable. You're right, this isn't New York. Subway trains in DC run much more frequently than in NY...all the time. When every day during rush hour the maximum wait for a train is 3 minutes 99.9% of the time, 9 minutes for a train pisses you off until you explode.

As of spring 2004, Grosvenor was the least used station on the Red Line in terms of boardings, other than Forest Glen. I highly doubt that statistic is any different 3 years later. Even if that stat is no longer correct, Grosvenor is not a significant generator of inbound riders during the PM Rush Period. Most people during that time are getting off outbound trains and leaving the system. Therefore, having trains skip Grosvenor to get back on schedule is justified. Additionally, as someone else pointed out in this thread, if no skips were given by central, the 9 minute delay becomes even longer as the train is delayed due to long dwell times.

The Red Line is scheduled to operate every 2.5 minutes during rush hour between Grosvenor and Silver Spring. A 9 minute wait for a train translates into a 6.5 minute delay, which is not a long "delay" at all. If being delayed 6 minutes is such a problem, you should allow more travel time to account for possible delays.

Love Train, if all trains were 6 cars, there is no way two trains were in that pocket, or else your delay would have been much longer...

Yes, I don't mean to be rude, but Love Train, the delay you experienced was nothing. In riding the Metro regularly for the last two years, and I find myself stuck in more delays with every day passing on both Metrobus and Metrorail. Metrobus has been the worser of the two with my bus often not showing up, resulting in up to a half-hour wait on some days, but that's irrelevant here.

Anyway, I've been having commuter hell for the last few months in which I've had to take Metro almost everyday to work, mostly the Red Line between Farragut North and Union Station. In June, there were many days in which I would get on at Farragut North, there would be a door problem at Metro Center, and the train would be stopped, unloaded, put out of service and back up trains during rush hour for ten to fifteen minutes on average. At another time, I got stuck in Pentagon City after seven when headways are only fifteen minutes, watched my Blue Line train back home have a door problem, be put out of service after being held for a little over five minutes, and be stuck waiting fifteen minutes after that for the next Blue Line train. I couldn't even take the Yellow Line train that showed up a little earlier since grabbing a Yellow Line train and changing at L'Enfant Plaza seems to always leave me with an extra ten minute layover. Back to the Red Line, the past two days have been especially bad for me in how on Sunday, some sort of track work was being done in which I had to wait eighteen minutes at five in the afternoon for a train to Glenmont. How this happened--given how trains are never supposed to have more than fifteen minute headways and trains to Shady Grove and Medical Center (between which was the trackwork) had twice the frequency--I don't know. I asked the station manager for permission to back out of the station and try to catch a bus instead as I would have been twenty minutes late to work as a result of the unexpected and unexplained lack of frequency, but eventually had to go back down and take the train anyway as no buses (including the "once-ever-ten-minutes" Circulator) showed up in waiting for fifteen minutes on the street. Today, there was problems with the PIMS that showed only fifteen minute headways to Glenmont. Frustrated, I talked to the station manager who knew nothing about the lack of trains. Fortunately, this issue turned out to be a false alarm as the PIMS was just wrong and there was only five minutes between trains (though I missed one while talking to the station manager), though I then learned from the station master that the CEO of Metro apparently wants to end the after-midnight service on weekends due to track work issues which is personally unacceptable due to me being out past midnight about every other weekend either at work, at conventions around the city, or with friends in my free time. Living in an area with infrequent and seemingly unreliable bus service makes this idea even less enticing. Apparently, the guy wants to replace late-night service with buses, but given my constant problems with the lateness, and breakdowns, and en-route disappearances of my two most-used buses, I have no faith in this idea.

My worst experience with Metrorail delays, though, was the incident on the Blue Line at the beginning of this month in which a friend and I got stuck in the Rosslyn Tunnel fiasco. I was joining a friend on her commute back home to Franconia-Springfield from Farragut West for dinner, missed a Blue Line train as we were just at the fare gates when one left, had a twelve minute wait for another one in the middle of rush hour, finally got an already very crowded train...and got stopped in the Rosslyn Tunnel due to brakes jamming on the Breda Rehab set I was on for nearly an hour. While on the train, which was completely packed, communication was horrible in how all we got from the driver was that “they were working on the problem.” There was no indication of what was going on or even what the problem was for that matter. We were just left to stand and amuse ourselves while some in a few cars back started panicking, one got ill, and eventually, we watched technicians move through the cars pushing up seats to do something to the traction motors at which we finally realized, “Oh, there’s a problem with the train. Would it have been so hard to tell us that half an hour ago?” Operations were single tracked to get around the bad train, and after the broken-down train finally got to Rosslyn with the help of an Orange Line train pushing (which dumped eight cars’ worth of passengers onto the already crowded platform and was also taken out of service). Chaos ensued as directions were changed at least twice as to where trains would be coming, and the station became so crowded to the point where a station master basically started bellowing into a megaphone that no one else would be allowed to enter the station. After about ten minutes or so, trains started coming again—one of which was a jam-packed six car Orange Line train with one car out of service for passengers from the previously unloaded eight-car train to jam themselves onto, and a similarly packed four-car Blue Line train also with (surprise, surprise) one car out of service which my friend and I didn’t even try to get on as we were almost up against the dead car and unable to move amongst the crowd. Fortunately, we were able to get the second Blue Line train through the station five minutes later…which had no air-conditioning on a 90+° day, but considering how a normal forty-minute commute became almost two hours, we were just happy to get out of the city.

I don’t know what’s going on regarding the Metro, maintenance, and my bad luck with delays. In addition, I fear that I’m starting to be viewed as a madman by the station attendants for asking why there is only half as much service on one direction of the Red Line far away from system track work or asking bus drivers if they know anything about my bus that never arrived half-an-hour earlier. Maybe I can find something out if I attend one of the Riders’ Advisory Council meetings next month. Otherwise, I just don’t understand the seemingly ever-growing mess in the Metro system. I talked to a Metro service representative and registered a few complaints from the last few days and my strong dissatisfaction with the direction of service under CEO Catoe, but though I’m told that he apparently cares about the welfare of riders, all the breakdowns and delays on Metrorail whilst being concerned about changing aesthetics and cutting back service (Never mind magically disappearing buses...) lead me to believe otherwise. At least on a positive note, in the same conversation with the service rep, I learned that dissatisfaction with the new Metro “doors closing” recordings is high enough that if enough people complain, they might finally drop them. A trivial issue, but a silver lining nevertheless.

By the way, the unrehabbed 3000s will probably still be around for a while. I still see them somewhat often on the Red Line. (That or I keep getting the same ones over and over again and am just not paying attention to the numbers.) As for the 6000s, if you really want to ride them, just go for a spin on the Green or Yellow Lines. They're quite common over that way.

All I have to say to the above is "Yikes!"

Congratulations, Washington! You have your very own overcrowded, delayed, falling apart subway just like the rest of us in Boston, NYC, Philly and Chicago!

Metro puts out notices about weekend trackwork and warns of the ensuing delays. Just because you aren't riding in the trackwork zone does not mean you won't be delayed, and one should allow extra time as needed.

Late night service would be bustituted. Considering the amount of trackwork and other things that need to be done during the overnight hours, and the relatively low ridership numbers during that time period, especially after 2 AM, bustituting is probably justified. It would also be good to open the system later on weekends. There is simply not enough time to get essential work done. I am in favor of running the buses at all times the trains don't run though, SEPTA style.

Love Train wrote:Is that a joke? 9 minutes for a WMATA Metrorail train during rush hour is absolutely unacceptable. You're right, this isn't New York. Subway trains in DC run much more frequently than in NY...all the time. When every day during rush hour the maximum wait for a train is 3 minutes 99.9% of the time, 9 minutes for a train pisses you off until you explode.

For Washington it is unacceptable, but in DC it never comes close to the capacity issues that NYC faces (try getting on the IRT Lexington Avenue Line during rush hour and you know what I mean). Still, I'd be pretty pissed off if I had to wait almost ten minutes for an already crowded train.

WMATAGMOAGH wrote:As of spring 2004, Grosvenor was the least used station on the Red Line in terms of boardings, other than Forest Glen. I highly doubt that statistic is any different 3 years later. Even if that stat is no longer correct, Grosvenor is not a significant generator of inbound riders during the PM Rush Period. Most people during that time are getting off outbound trains and leaving the system. Therefore, having trains skip Grosvenor to get back on schedule is justified. Additionally, as someone else pointed out in this thread, if no skips were given by central, the 9 minute delay becomes even longer as the train is delayed due to long dwell times.

The Red Line is scheduled to operate every 2.5 minutes during rush hour between Grosvenor and Silver Spring. A 9 minute wait for a train translates into a 6.5 minute delay, which is not a long "delay" at all. If being delayed 6 minutes is such a problem, you should allow more travel time to account for possible delays.

Love Train, if all trains were 6 cars, there is no way two trains were in that pocket, or else your delay would have been much longer...

Where did you find that Grosvenor was the least used one, I would have thought that one like Twinbrook would be the least-utilised.

I've never been on a Red Line Train that has skipped Grosvenor, but if necessary, it may skip that stop as Oren mnetioned. And 9 minutes isn't that big of a deal, especially off-peak, but even during peak time, it could be a wee bit of a delay. As Octr202 said, our hometown MBTA system has that long or longer time gap for another train to come after the previous one (more of the time, since it's a far older system) during peak hours during an incident.

I think Oren is wrong about Grosvenor. Grosvenor is one of the busier stations. They just built a huge new parking garage because the station needed it because so many people use the station. Then add all the people disembarking from terminating trains at Grosvenor only to board the next Shady Grove bound train to continue to their destinations and you get a very crowded station. I know this is difficult for you to grasp, Oren, but you are wrong.

Love Train wrote:I think Oren is wrong about Grosvenor. Grosvenor is one of the busier stations. They just built a huge new parking garage because the station needed it because so many people use the station. Then add all the people disembarking from terminating trains at Grosvenor only to board the next Shady Grove bound train to continue to their destinations and you get a very crowded station. I know this is difficult for you to grasp, Oren, but you are wrong.

If I'm wrong on this one, then the official WMATA Ridership Data, which I looked at before making my post, and which is generated from the faregates used by all the actual customers, is wrong. Something tells me that isn't the case. I should have used the word "entires" instead of "boardings" in my previous post, since the ridership report is the average number of entries made at the station on a weekday, if I recall correctly. It does not account for the people who get off the short turn trains to wait for a continuing one. Additionally, the new garage simply indicates that an increase in parking capacity was needed, not that the station is necessarily busier than any other on the line.

Grosvenor is rarely skipped to assist in scheduling adjustments, but it does happen. I was once on a Grosvenor bound train, wishing to go beyond that station, in the midday period on a weekday. There was a delay in service, and the next train, bound for Shady Grove, was given a skip so that it did not stop at Grosvenor. The next train went out of service at Grosvenor, as scheduled. The train after that was the next train that stopped and continued on towards Shady Grove. While that scenario is probably very rare, skipping Grosvenor heading inbound at PM Rush, especially with a train coming out of the pocket, is not a bad idea if scheduling adjustments need to be made.