Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld said Friday the transit agency will extend lower levels of service for another week, saying there was no timetable for when the new 7000-series fleet — stricken by problems with their wheel assemblies — could be put back into use.
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Metro indicated early this week that rail service would remain limited until at least Sunday, but Wiedefeld announced Friday that the lower levels would be extended until Oct. 31. The suspension of 60 percent of Metro’s rail cars has forced the transit agency to run the 91-station rail system using 40 train sets.
Metro is operating trains at 15-to-20-minute intervals on the Red Line and 30 to 40 minutes on other lines while 7000 series cars remain sidelined. Silver Line trains are operating between the Wiehle-Reston East and Federal Center SW stations.
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“It’s been a difficult week for people who depend on Metro,” Wiedefeld said Friday.
The comments Friday marked the first time the agency has commented this week beyond written statements since the derailment.
Federal investigators indicated the agency knew of problems with the cars since 2017 but did not report them to the safety commission or remove the series earlier. Wiedefeld said Friday that the wheels were being replaced under warranty and that, until this year, only isolated cases were discovered among the thousands of inspections Metro carries out each year.
But Wiedefeld acknowledged than when the problems ticked up dramatically this year, more should have been done.
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“That is definitely where that should have been raised much sooner," he said.
Transit officials said an agreement with the National Transportation Safety Board restricts them from speaking about the investigation, but elected officials and riders have expressed frustration over a lack of information about how long transit service could be operating without Metro’s 7000-series trains. The series is Metro’s newest and largest train set, with greater ability to operate trains with eight cars instead of six.
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Safety board investigators are trying to determine why wheels on nearly two dozen 7000-series rail cars had shifted, putting trains at greater risk for derailments and other incidents. The investigation team — which includes Metro safety experts and investigators from the independent Washington Metrorail Safety Commission — has disassembled and inspected wheel sets at a Metro maintenance facility this week.
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No one was injured in the derailment on Oct. 12, which prompted the evacuation of 187 passengers outside the Arlington Cemetery station, but it led the safety commission to pull all 748 of Metro’s 7000-series cars out of commission on Sunday night. The service cuts have created crowded conditions and left many commuters searching for other methods of travel.
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Wiedefeld said he recognized that the derailment and problems with the cars could hurt the public’s confidence in the system, but said he believed trust could be recovered.
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“We’re not hiding anything,” he said. “We want to be as transparent as possible.”
Friday’s announcement came two days after Metro’s board announced it will hire outside experts to scrutinize practices and procedures at the transit agency, an effort partly aimed at restoring public confidence.
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Paul Smedberg, the board chairman, who appeared alongside Wiedefeld in the virtual briefing, said the board continued to have confidence in Metro’s leadership.
“We’re behind the entire team,” he said.
Smedberg acknowledged that the board had some concerns over not being informed of the wheel assembly issues sooner, but said he was reserving judgment on whether he should have been briefed.
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Democratic U.S. Sens. Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia wrote Wiedefeld on Thursday night urging Metro to cooperate with the NTSB’s investigation. They said they were “deeply troubled by the possibility that WMATA knew about this safety concern as early as 2017, but failed to implement a course of action sufficient to prevent last week’s derailment.”
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The senators called on Wiedefeld to share more information about the transit agency’s recovery plans and safety efforts.
“We will be eager to hear from you in a timely manner on your plans to address the specific safety concerns associated with last week’s derailment, to restore public confidence in your organization, and to embed safety more effectively into your organizational culture — a repeated focus of our discussions with you since you took the helm of [Metro] six years ago,” they wrote.