Woman falls on tracks, station exits jammed

Hundreds of thousands of people swarmed onto Metro trains this morning to head downtown for Barack Obama’s historic inauguration, crowding railcars, platforms and exits until traffic ground to a near halt in many stations. Some trains stopped entirely on the Red Line after a 68-year-old woman fell onto the track at Gallery Place/Chinatown. She was found conscious and breathing under a platform crawl space around 9:25 a.m., Metro officials said, and was taken to a local hospital. By 11 a.m., 510,590 riders had entered the rail system, when on a typical weekday the system carries about 770,000 over the course of a full day. Metro officials expect even heavier traffic this afternoon as crowds try to exit the National Mall and parade route at once.