Major rehabilitation on Metro Center’s platform caused delays on the red, blue and orange Metro lines last weekend, tripping up students who attended Georgetown’s basketball games on Saturday afternoon and Monday evening at the Verizon Center. Trains travelling in both directions from the nearby Gallery Place-Chinatown Station were put on the same track, causing delays of half-an-hour or more.
Although students were warned in a campus-wide e-mail ahead of time about the delays, riders were surprised by how much longer their trip took.
“The whole trip took almost an hour, which usually takes about 20 minutes,” John Bufe (COL ’11) said about his Saturday trip to the Verizon Center. “[Metro] said there were going to be some delays, but I don’t think everyone really understood that it was going to be taking three times as long to get back.”
The platform rehabilitation has been planned for a year, according to Managing Director of Engineering and Capital Projects David Couch. After about 32 years and 600 million passengers, the bearing pads—which support the beams that hold up the platforms—were deteriorating and causing the platform to sag.
According to Metro spokesperson Steven Taubenkibel, the complaints he received on Tuesday all concerned the holiday weekend delays.
In response to the complaints, Taubenkibel said that Metro needed the three day weekend to finish the repairs—had they not used Martin Luther King weekend and President’s weekend to work on the platform, construction would have taken four consecutive weekends.
After the first weekend of construction, Couch is pleased with the project’s progress.
“It went very well,” Couch said. “We anticipated that we would need a three day weekend to do it, and that’s exactly what it turned out to be.”
