While the Washington Metro Orange/Blue and Red lines already run regular 8-car consists, WMATA is testing using more 8-car consists from end-to-end on the Green Line today through Friday to ensure that the recently upgraded power supply on the Green line supports the longer trains. All stations system-wide already accomodate 8-car trains but the power system has had to be upgraded in some systems.
The effort is in anticipation of at least one million riders on Inauguration Day and the Green Line is expected to be one of the busiest in the system.
Here are some interesting details from the article: “On the Green Line, we typically run 13 six-car trains and seven eight-car trains during the peak periods,” says Taubekibel. “These next couple of days we are going to run 10 six-car trains and 10 eight-car trains.”
Though I don’t remember which year it was, I vividly remember when WMATA disabled all emergency doors systemwide. You might have noticed that only one half of the sliding doors would open during that entire day. Metro workers found what they thought was a fault in the emergency door mechanism which allowed a door to open while the car was in motion–I believe a passenger was leaning on a door that slid partially open while moving.
Since it was too close to fix it before the July 4 holiday, rather than allowing people to save their own lives in the event of a power failure or heaven forbid a fire in a tunnel, they disabled all emergency doors and the doors only opened halfway during yet another record-breaking July day.
I do believe the doors were jammed shut on July 4 because we usually would visit DC via Metro that day.