WMATA - SafeTrack (spring 2017)

"farecard"

Not my drift at all. I'm saving that if stations had passing tracks in their initial design, there would be some advantages.
That would not replace the need for RoW & rolling stock maintenance.
And yes the platforms would had to have been spaced slightly further apart.

I addressed that here. A passing track whether it be between the mainline tracks of a twin platform station or splitting the platform of an island platform station would make the stations wider. For a twin platform station it would be 16' to accomadate a walkway and support columns in the tunnels at either end of the station, 11' when splitting the platform of an island platform station. Such a schema would more then double the interlocking infrastructure. Any way you slice it, a configuration like that would have increased the costs to build and more importantly the costs to maintain.

Never said it should do that. I want it to serve the terminal itself, not the parking lot. And an open-air station is oh so attractive on nights like tonight [29F, 20 kts] & mid-August vs. an underground one.

Had all the parties involved been willing to pony up the additional roughly $750 million I wouldn't be photographing the construction of the station in its present location.

I'll add one aspect I see I failed to make clear earlier in this thread. My center passing track scheme is intended for aboveground stations, not core center underground ones. Underground, double crossovers would save tunneling.

While crossovers would allow shunting around a "train dead in station" case, it would not allow express operation as I also mention; that would require disrupting alternate direction operation.

Due to last week's wintry weather, Metro extended Surge 13 for an additional two days and, more importantly, cancelled 'phase 2' of the Surge, which was focused on King St to Huntington alone. Instead, phase 2 will be dealt with sometime later in the year. Instead, phase 1 - which affects the Blue and Yellow lines - will continue the duration of the surge. https://www.wmata.com/service/status/de ... rge-13.cfm

And a pain in the tuckus Phase I is, for us "southerners." Waited nearly 1/2 hr for a Blue train south from Braddock tonight.

mtuandrew wrote:And a pain in the tuckus Phase I is, for us "southerners." Waited nearly 1/2 hr for a Blue train south from Braddock tonight.

I hear you - we had our pain last year when they were working on Orange.

In a way these things you can at least plan around. It is the random single-tracking that drives me nuts. We were at the hockey game tonight, and just as the game was letting out, Metro decided to single-track the Red line. No notification, no audible announcement - just another day of Metro suckitude. The first indication we saw was when a nice 7000 series 8-car Red line train came into the station on the wrong track (I wasn't convinced that it was really going to Shady Grove - earlier in the evening I had seen a Red line train with a destination of "Ballston"). Of course by then both platforms were packed to capacity, and you had a mad rush to get from one side to the other, and that train had left mostly empty rather than wait for people to go up and over and fight through the Glenmont crowd. We just walked to Metro Center.

JackRussell wrote:

mtuandrew wrote:And a pain in the tuckus Phase I is, for us "southerners." Waited nearly 1/2 hr for a Blue train south from Braddock tonight.

I hear you - we had our pain last year when they were working on Orange.

In a way these things you can at least plan around. It is the random single-tracking that drives me nuts. We were at the hockey game tonight, and just as the game was letting out, Metro decided to single-track the Red line. No notification, no audible announcement - just another day of Metro suckitude. The first indication we saw was when a nice 7000 series 8-car Red line train came into the station on the wrong track (I wasn't convinced that it was really going to Shady Grove - earlier in the evening I had seen a Red line train with a destination of "Ballston"). Of course by then both platforms were packed to capacity, and you had a mad rush to get from one side to the other, and that train had left mostly empty rather than wait for people to go up and over and fight through the Glenmont crowd. We just walked to Metro Center.

For this particular instance, weeknight single-tracking was announced Monday; it starts 10p each night, continuing through Thursday (https://www.wmata.com/service/status/de ... eekday.cfm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;). They tweeted about it as well (https://twitter.com/Metrorailinfo/statu ... 3236587522" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;), but it's so vague as to not convey usable information ("which track should I be on at these stations?")

srepetsk wrote: For this particular instance, weeknight single-tracking was announced Monday; it starts 10p each night, continuing through Thursday (https://www.wmata.com/service/status/de ... eekday.cfm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;). They tweeted about it as well (https://twitter.com/Metrorailinfo/statu ... 3236587522" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;), but it's so vague as to not convey usable information ("which track should I be on at these stations?")

I have no doubt that it was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

The station attendants *KNEW* there was a hockey game, and there would be thousands of people trying to enter the station right about the time that this mess started. Yet they did nothing to prevent people from lining up on the wrong platform.

And there does not seem to be a functional PA system that allows them to make any kind of announcements either. The PIDS displays did not provide useful information. There were no signboards or anything else that we saw when we first arrived at the arena either - that was another missed opportunity. I have no doubt that they could have gotten the arena staff to put a message up on the big screen over the ice - another missed opportunity.

The only "public" information I found was that metro tweeted right about the time the game got out - earlier in the day there was nothing. So to us it appeared that they just pulled it out of their backsides at the last minute for no discernible reason.