Metro Moves

Posted on January 12, 2007 by Gene

I don’t know why I think this is interesting, but I do: the Washington Metro is temporarily moving around the subway lines due to track work this weekend at a single station. It means that some of the lines are being moved to other tracks, so stations will have new colors for the weekend. In fact, this is so unusual that Metro has created new subway maps to be placed in trains and stations for the next few days.
Having lived in DC all my life, this is earth-shaking because I have the entire Metro system locked into my head, unchanging; and suddenly the Blue line is completely divorced from the Orange line, with which it has been partnered for decades. Now the Orange line is a single color, with a forked eastern end.
Perhaps the biggest change is at Gallery Place and L’Enfant Plaza, which will both have the distinction of being the first stations to serve four different Metro lines at once.
Kudos to Metro for reworking the map, even for a weekend — it makes the changes clear and eliminates the confusion that would reign with station signs and announcements over the unintelligible system PAs…