Metro Had A Major Screw-Up This Weekend

WASHINGTON, DC — Sandwiched between two utter disasters on the Metro Red Line last Friday and Tuesday was another apparent screw-up on the part of WMATA that you may not have heard about -- and Metro's version of the event seems to differ substantially from what an independent group says really happened.

Metro incorrectly routed an outbound Blue Line train to the Orange/Silver lines at the Rosslyn station on Saturday, forcing the operator to offload the train at Courthouse, according to a report from the Rail Transit OPS Group, an "independent, publicly-funded group that analyzes and evaluates the operations, performance and safety of passenger rail transit systems across the country," according to their site.

The incident happened at around 7:15 p.m. on June 24, and it prompted the operator to contact the Rail Operations Control Center, which instructed the operator to offload at the next station.

After offloading at Courthouse, the train was sent to Clarendon where it crossed over to the inbound tracks and then reversed back to pick up passengers at Courthouse, continuing to Foggy Bottom where it "was once again crossed over to the outbound track and reversed" at 7:33 p.m., the report states.

The train resumed service to Pentagon City at that point (the Crystal City station had been shutdown for maintenance).

WMATA reported the incident as a "train malfunction" at the time. But Rail Transit OPS attributed the cause to "train operator lost situational awareness," suggesting it had nothing to do with the train itself.

Asked for comment, Metro spokesman Dan Stessel told Patch via email that WMATA's characterization of the incident was fine, and the agency simply goes with "train malfunction" in such situations because of Twitter's limitations.

"Train operators do not control the routing of trains, so this would not be considered 'operator error,'" he said. "Train malfunction is an acceptable catch all description for the purposes of an alert advising customers of a single-train delay in this case. The ROCC is working with 140 characters."

The Rail Transit OPS Group recommended that Metro take a few actions to prevent it from happening in the future, including: installation of interlocking flood lights at Rosslyn; relocation of a signal to a point within the operator's field of view; and installation of a new digital PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) system.

Blue Line: Expect residual delays to Franconia-Springfield due to an earlier train malfunction outside Rosslyn.
— Metrorail Info (@Metrorailinfo) June 24, 2017

Image via WMATA